American History through Hollywood Film

Melvyn Stokes is Reader in Film History in the Department of History at University College London, UK.

• Introduction 1. The American Revolution 2. Slavery 3. Abraham Lincoln 4. The Civil War 5. The War's Legacy: the Lost Cause and the Ku Klux Klan 6. 'The Good Indian': Dances With Wolves 7. The Golden Door: Hester Street and The Godfather Part II 8. The Limits of Hollywood History: The Grapes of Wrath and the Great Depression 9. HUAC and Hollywood: The Way We Were and Guilty by Suspicion 10. Remembering the 1960s: Mississippi Burning and JFK BibliographyIndex

American History through Hollywood Film is a very useful book. The range of topics and films covered, Stokes’s knowledge, rigorous methodology, precise style and experience teaching this topic, make it an indispensable book for a class on American history in Hollywood cinema and a book that should be recommended as an example to all students writing theses or dissertations on the representation of history on film or the relationship between history and cinema. The overviews it offers on each point will provide a good starting point for any student or scholar interested in pursuing them. For all of these reasons, I cannot recommend Stokes’s book enough.