Hollywood and the American Historical Film

J.E. Smyth is Assistant Professor of History and Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen Kane and Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race and History.

Hollywood and the American Historical Film explores the specifics as well as the methods whereby Hollywood offers up history to its audiences...this collection brings a new complexity to its topic. These essays are consistently fascinating, and refreshing in their sophisticated approaches.

• Introduction; J.E.SmythFilm and History: Artefact and Experience; W.SusmanFilm History, Reconstruction and Southern Legendary History in The Birth of a Nation (1915); D.CulbertThe Hollywood Western, the Movement-Image and Making History; M.LandyRipping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) on Gone with the Wind (1939); S.CourtneyHollywood About Hollywood: Genre as Historiography; R.SklarSome Like it Hot (1959) and The Virtues of Not Taking History Too Seriously; D.EldridgeVico's Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); M.Roche & V.HösleAnatomy of a Shipwreck: Warner Bros., The White House and the Celluloid Sinking of PT 109 (1963); N.J.CullThe Long Road of Women's Memory: Fred Zinnemann's Julia (1977); J.E.SmythInventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen; R.Rosenstone'This is not America; this is Los Angeles': Crime, Space and History in the City of Angels; I.ScottBetween Nostalgia and Regret: Strategies of Historical Disruption from Douglas Sirk to Mad Men; V.DikaFurther Reading.