John E. O'Connor

First things first: This is a collection of fifteen essays about American films that depicted the historical past and, in doing so, reflected the times in which they were made. The films – King Vidor’s The Big Parade, John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, Howard Hawks’ Red River, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde among them -- are nearly all acknowledged classics. The editors founded the academic study of film and history in the United States in 1970, when they established the Historians’ Film Committee of the American Historical Association. The contributors include the authors of some of the pivotal works in the field: Peter C. Rollins, Robert Sklar, Garth Jowett, and Lawrence Suid. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of the first leading historians to champion the study of film and history, contributed the foreword. American History/American Film is, in short, a major work and a landmark in the history of its field.

It is also well over thirty years old: The first edition appeared in 1979, and the second (expanded from fourteen essays to fifteen by the addition of a piece on Oliver Stone’s newly released Platoon) in 1988. The book’s age is evident in the editor’s casual references to the need to rent 16 millimeter films from distributors in order to watch them (the VCR was still several years away), and in sources – then current, now dated – cited in the bibliographies. It is even more evident, however, in the essays’ approach to the films. The content is film-and-history 101: careful establishing that film production is shaped by the social and political context in which it happens, and that films about the past also say much about their own present. Much that is now taken for granted by professional historians who use film as a window on the past was still fresh and raw and unfamiliar when this book was written. Things that an astute undergraduate would now take (almost) for granted were still being worked out, and so needed careful explanation.

Readers familiar with later film-and-history scholarship – with Robert Rosenstone, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Brent Toplin, or the later works of O’Conner and Rollins – may find the essays in American History/American Film a little slow, a little basic. Readers approaching the intersection of history and film for the first time, however, will find them magnificently clear and accessible, precisely because they presume detailed knowledge of neither history nor film. If I was teaching an introductory course on American history on film, this would be the first book I’d assign students to read. If someone asked me for a good introduction to this, my own particular corner of the academic landscape, this would be the book I would hand them.

It is also well over thirty years old: The first edition appeared in 1979, and the second (expanded from fourteen essays to fifteen by the addition of a piece on Oliver Stone’s newly released Platoon) in 1988. The book’s age is evident in the editor’s casual references to the need to rent 16 millimeter films from distributors in order to watch them (the VCR was still several years away), and in sources – then current, now dated – cited in the bibliographies. It is even more evident, however, in the essays’ approach to the films. The content is film-and-history 101: careful establishing that film production is shaped by the social and political context in which it happens, and that films about the past also say much about their own present. Much that is now taken for granted by professional historians who use film as a window on the past was still fresh and raw and unfamiliar when this book was written. Things that an astute undergraduate would now take (almost) for granted were still being worked out, and so needed careful explanation.

Readers familiar with later film-and-history scholarship – with Robert Rosenstone, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Brent Toplin, or the later works of O’Conner and Rollins – may find the essays in American History/American Film a little slow, a little basic. Readers approaching the intersection of history and film for the first time, however, will find them magnificently clear and accessible, precisely because they presume detailed knowledge of neither history nor film. If I was teaching an introductory course on American history on film, this would be the first book I’d assign students to read. If someone asked me for a good introduction to this, my own particular corner of the academic landscape, this would be the book I would hand them.… (altro)