It may get reduced to that belief, but every written account I’ve seen indicated the assasination was just a trigger, the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the cause of the war.
Are you being Serious? You should go to Yahoo to check out your facts.
Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!
There were a few plantations like that, but they were such a minority that it’s kind of objectionable to create a character in the deep south in that time out of that, it smacks of “creating the unambiguously noble hero.”
One of the Founding Fathers from my neck of the woods, George Wythe, actually practiced what he preached and ran a plantation of freedmen. Lots of FFs deplored slavery and a few even freed their slaves in their wills (once they were done with them), but Wythe freed his slaves in his own time, and tried to grant the ones who stayed on with him a share of his estate when he died.
I believe that lip service was paid to history with a caption at the end. It said something like the movie was fiction but several Enigma machines were captured by both British and Americans and the film was dedicated to them.
and the costuming:D
But what about U-571? The British were the first to capture an Enigma machine, not the Americans. gets punched in the face
You know, I thought you were wooshed… until I checked IMDB and “re-learned” that the lead in that movie was not played by Pauly Shore.
Well played.
Stirling Bridge. And I do not believe the words “Battle of Stirling Bridge” appear on screen; IIRC it just said “Stirling.”
Battles are often named after geographic features that didn’t feature prominently in the battle. The Battle of Bunker Hill was not fought on Bunker Hill, the Battle of Midway was mostly fought so far from Midway that you could not even have seen the island. The Battle of Stirling Bridge as it was actually fought had effectively the same outcome, but would have been less heroic-looking.
People never seem to have problems with the Scottish wearing clan tartan kilts, despite the fact that this is about as historically accurate as having the soldiers in a World War II epic using phasers and spaceships.
In addition to which there’s a lot of discussion as to whether the incident of her sparing his life ever even happened. John Smith wrote about it many years later, by which time he’d already told an almost identical story that happened in Turkey, and it’s known that he was a notorious liar to begin with. (Among other things, he depicted himself as a poor orphan abused by his foster parents- he was middle class and he was grown and long gone from home when his parents died.)
The frustrating thing about Smith is that he did have some adventures, some of them probably really the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow sort involving Turks and possibly the Countess Bathory (yep, the Blood Countess- there’s a good chance he really did enter her service) and “red Indians” and other sorts, but he also liked to gild the lily, so it’s impossible to know which of his tales is true and isn’t.
Adding to the melee of fact and fiction is that some Indian tribes did have a ritual similar to the one Smith depicted- it was less an “actually going to kill you” thing and more like a baptism into the tribe- so it could have been that. And Pocahontas does seem to have been particularly beloved by her father, [the chief usually known to history as] Powhatan, which was an achievement considering he had dozens of children and gave many of them away. On the other other hand, some biographers believe she may have been married or betrothed to a tribe member by the time she married John Rolfe as well. (In a case of ‘sometimes there is some truth to the romantic side of history’, while her marriage to Rolfe [a grieving widower when he met her] certainly had advantages for both sides, he seems to have genuinely loved her as well, possibly more than she did him.)
Pocahontas probably would have seen some of Shakespeare’s plays enacted as she stayed in an inn frequented by actors in England. It was also an inn where disease spread a lot, which led to her death.
In any case, Pocahontas definitely did know and like John Smith when he was in Virginia. There’s no evidence she was in love with him.
This is wrong. I read it last year and, using Wikipedia to refresh my memory, in the book it was the Russian Count Rostopchin who ordered the burning of Moscow.
And the Brits seem to forget that the Enigma code was first cracked by the Poles. Earlier, simpler machine, but same principles.
I think the creators of Pocahantas admitted that they purposely ignored history and based their movie on the mythological story that includes the Smith/Pocahontas romance.
Not long ago I watched Amadeus with a bunch of cut scenes restored. They were so bad that they managed to ruin the entire movie for me. I will never watch it again.
Tolstoy is actually very careful about his history in War and Peace. When I read it, for a course, I did a report about his handling of Napoleon. Tolstoy only uses accounts of Napoleon’s actions and words as reported by others, but he fiendishly gives them a different interpretation than is usually assigned to them. Tolstoy wanted to point out how slippery a thing History is, and how little influence an individual has in it, and how easily misinterpreted it is. He has a grand theory of History as the Result of Integrating the Differentials (people) to produce the final result, which is sort of like Isaac Asimov’s "Statistical Mechanics: model that became “Psychohistory” in his “Foundation” series.
You should read it, because you hear wrong. Such a view would be inconsistent with Tolstoy’s ground-up granular view of history. Tolstoy on the burning of Moscow:
This thread is afire with the fuel that feeds my dislike of historical fiction as a genre and the most common thing I hear from people who enjoy it: “I learn so much!”
Great, I’m happy that you think so, but I’m willing to bet half or more of what you’re “learning” is complete bullshit.
Though the sequel, in which she goes to London, does show her married to John Rolfe. (I have no idea if she dies in the sequel as she did in real life; it would seem rather depressing.)
This was my complaint with the genre for a long time, but I think the Internet has greatly improved it. It’s now very easy to watch a historical film and then pull up the historical inaccuracies. You get an entertaining film / miniseries, and actually DO learn something if you synthesize the corrections.
Films, yes. Mostly the people I interact with are fans of historical fiction novels.
And not about to go researching anything on the internet. 