Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation's past.
"Historians love to complain about how popular movies distort the past, even as we envy their power to shape perceptions and beliefs. The authors in this lively collection instead consider what those films can teach us about the past, the film makers' present, and the evolving mythologies of American exceptionalism."--Kenneth Noe, author of The Yellowhammer War: Alabama in the Civil War and Reconstruction
"In Writing History with Lightning, Matthew Hulbert and John Inscoe assemble an all-star cast of scholars to explore a century of filmmaking about nineteenth-century America. Covering a wide range of movies and subjects, these fun, insightful essays shine the brightest when they look beyond Hollywood's historical inaccuracies and explain what filmmaking and history have in common--tension, interpretation, narrative, context, and resonance. I give it two thumbs up!"--Jason Phillips, author of Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future
