Birth of a Nation was based upon the Broadway play, The Clansman. The film was widely criticized and resulted in riots in certain cities. Partly as a response the director D. W. Griffith followed it up with Intolerance. Admittedly the latter flick didn’t address the KKK. Also admittedly Birth was a commercial success while Intolerance was a commercial failure. Then again Birth was a 2 hour film while Intolerance lasted 3 and a half hours.
I am curious. Who rioted in what cities?
Birth of a Nation is obviously slanted towards the long suffering South, although I understand that Reconstruction was not pleasant.
I know you’re being ironic but as a matter of historical fact, Douglass was not a Republican (at least not in 1860). He voted that year for Gerrit Smith, who was the Liberty Party candidate - they were the only party calling for abolition.
Weren’t the Republicans Whigs or something else in the eighteenth century?
Certainly not the Republicans of today.
There were both protests, organized by the NAACP, as well as a handful of actual riots. The NAACP was right to be concerned with how black people were portrayed in the film, too.[
Mostly whigs, but also anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, and Know Nothings. Certainly the party in 1854 (at its founding) or 1860 (when its second presidential candidate won election) was nothing like the party of today. Neither are the democrats. I would hope nobody today is basing their vote on the stances of the two parties 150 years ago.
I lived in Germany for a few years, and I saw a complete and unqualified repudiation of what their country did in WWII. I never heard anyone, publicly or privately, defend or mitigate their country’s actions in any way. In fact, they seem to be their own biggest critics. And I don’t mean to laud this behavior. It seems like the only decent response to being so catastrophically on the wrong side of history. The fact that there are still those in the South that haven’t been able to come to this conclusion just shows what spectacular twats they are.
You’re not helping, Dumbguy. :eek:
The Birth of a Nation - Wikipedia
Longer quote:
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, protested premieres of the film in numerous cities. It also conducted a public education campaign, publishing articles protesting the film’s fabrications and inaccuracies, organizing petitions against it, and conducting education on the facts of the war and Reconstruction.[24]
When the film was shown, riots broke out in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. The cities of Chicago; Denver; Kansas City, Missouri; Minneapolis; Pittsburgh; and St. Louis, Missouri, refused to allow the film to open. The film’s inflammatory character was a catalyst for gangs of whites to attack blacks. In Lafayette, Indiana, after seeing the film, a white man murdered a black teenager.[25]
…
The film is controversial due to its interpretation of history. University of Houston historian Steven Mintz summarizes its message as follows: Reconstruction was a disaster, blacks could never be integrated into white society as equals, and the violent actions of the Ku Klux Klan were justified to reestablish honest government.[30] The film suggested that the Ku Klux Klan restored order to the post-war South, which was depicted as endangered by abolitionists, freedmen, and carpetbagging Republican politicians from the North. This reflects the so-called Dunning School of historiography.[31] The film also portrays beloved President Abraham Lincoln as friend of the Confederacy and hero to the racist White South. He is referred to as “the Great Heart”.
Some historians, such as E. Merton Coulter in his The South Under Reconstruction (1947), maintained the Dunning School view after World War II. Today, the Dunning School position is largely seen as a product of anti-black racism of the early 20th century, by which many Americans held that black Americans were unequal as citizens.
Veteran film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote,
... stung by criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in Intolerance (1916), which criticized prejudice. And in Broken Blossoms he told perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies—even though, to be sure, it's an idealized love with no touching.[32]
Despite some similarities between the Congressman Stoneman character and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Rep. Stevens did not have the family members described and did not move to South Carolina during Reconstruction. He died in Washington, DC in 1868. However, Stevens was widely rumored to keep a biracial mistress-housekeeper, who was generously provided for in his will.[33]
The depictions of mass Klan paramilitary actions do not seem to have historical equivalents, although there were incidents in 1871 where Klan groups traveled from other areas in fairly large numbers to aid localities in disarming local companies of the all-black portion of the state militia under various justifications, prior to the eventual Federal troop intervention, and the organized Klan’s continued activities as small groups of “night riders”.[34]
The civil rights movement and other social movements created a new generation of historians, such as scholar Eric Foner, who led a reassessment of Reconstruction. Building on Du Bois’ work but also adding new sources, they focused on achievements of the African-American and white Republican coalitions, such as establishment of universal public education and charitable institutions in the South and extension of suffrage to black men. In response, the Southern-dominated Democratic Party and its affiliated white militias used extensive terrorism, intimidation and outright assassinations to suppress African-American leaders and voting in the 1870s and to regain power.[35]
[/QUOTE]
Dumbguy: Actually the German case is fairly unusual. The Austrians and Japanese for example more typically paper over their WWII atrocities. At the other extreme is Turkey, which straight up deny their genocide in Armenia - which is odd given that their founder (Ataturk) was the opponent of that government.
We’re supposed to help in the Pit? Since when? Okay, if that’s a new rule, let’s go through this, step by step:
- The secessionists seceded because they wanted to continue slavery, making them twats.
- They had their asses handed to them in a big war; after which a lot of guys would reassess their beliefs and try to understand why most people thought they were twats. Instead they made no effort to, then romanticized their cause and lied about what they were fighting for. This made them bigger twats.
- Griffith makes a film glorifying dad’s and grand-dad’s exploits and blatantly lying about history, making him a monstrous twat.
- Today the great-great-grandsons continue to lie about events we have written records of, denying it all and promoting their non-truths as things we should all believe are true. After 150 years of being mean, stupid, and wrong, I don’t think Dumbguy exaggerated calling them “spectacular twats.”
The math is pretty simple, but if someone needs help understanding it I’m glad to help. :rolleyes:
I think that math works pretty well. 
The rolleyes ain’t what it used to be. :rolleyes:
[quote=“GIGObuster, post:5, topic:682251”]
Andrew Napolitano really needs a crash course in American history. 
I really love Crash Course. In one of their American History segments on the civil war Mr. Green said thus:
[/QUOTE]He doesn’t need a crash course in history. He took the same history classes and read the same history books as the rest of us. He just thinks he (and his friends) have uncovered the REAL history of the Civil War. That the history of the Civil War he was taught in JHS and HS were just gross over simplifications to explain things that kids can’t understand in high school. I have met too many people like this to believe that they don’t know the real version, they just don’t want to believe it.
I KNOW!!! That little smirk destroys it. I do not smirk when I’m rolling my eyes at stupidity, and neither should my emoticons.
I thought it was based on two novels by Thomas Dixon – The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots.
What’s all this about new smilies? They all look exactly the same as always to me.
Its not often I say this but I wish the South were more like the Germans
Why is it the South that gets singled out for slavery? The North had slavery too. The major slave trading ports were in New England. Maryland was a slave state that still allowed slavery even during the Civil War. If you live in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island or any of the other 13 original colonies, slavery was practiced their as well. The South needed slaves more than the North because it was an agrarian society that depended on the types of manual labor that slaved tend to be really useful for. The same is true in the Caribbean and other countries like Brazil.
There wasn’t anything unique about slavery in the South. It just lasted later than it did in parts of the country where it proved less useful. Many states once had slavery, now none of them do and haven’t for a long time. Why is it that most people just handwave away the history of slavery in other parts of the country like it never existed and everyone in the North was always against it one principle alone? That wasn’t the case.
Maybe because the South whole society revolved around slavery. Maybe because the South started the Civil War over slavery. Maybe because many parts of the South still have significant populations who fetishize the slave days and want them back.
It really is different. Nearly every group of humans with more organized than a tribal family has practiced some form of slavery. But the South kept at it longer than most. And they did it in a way that set them apart. The economic and political power of the South was entirely based on slavery. Without all those extra 3/5 of a persons in the South, the house of Reps and the electoral college would have been dominated by the North (fun fact: long before Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson was called the “Black President” because without the “slave vote” he would not have been elected.) As the rest of the country, and the world, turned away from slavery, the South found new moral justifications for it. No longer was someone a slave because of an accident of history, or just the way things were. Slavery became the moral duty of the human race. Read up on the changing attitudes in the South as the tide begin to turn against them. The South became totally morally bankrupt, and some still worship that.
And now two of them – only two, 
and :rolleyes: – look different – what’s up with that?!