Gods and Generals

[5 th Alabama Infantry]

"I'd go on, but I am totally disgusted."

I actually read the Dixon's The Klansman! My chest became bruised from my jaw dropping at the hateful nonsense! The DVD copy I picked up has "Ride of the Valkyries" as a sound track for the "rescue!"

Hey guys , lighten up . You put yourself in 1861 all the time .
Put yourself in 1915.

[sbl]

"Hey guys , lighten up . You put yourself in 1861 all the time .
Put yourself in 1915."

The problem is that you sir seem to be putting 1861 now.

[40AcreMule]

Hey guys , lighten up . You put yourself in 1861 all the time . Put yourself in 1915.

As a person of color I deeply resent the "lighten up" comment. I don't live in 1961 or in 1915. I live in 2008.

You, however, obviously still live in slavery and Jim Crow days if you think a serious discussion on a film that negatively impacted civil rights is something that can just be brushed off with a thoughless comment.

[CheeseBoxRaft]

Hey guys , lighten up . You put yourself in 1861 all the time . Put yourself in 1915.

I take this to mean if you lived in 1915 then it would somehow be OK to openly hate blacks, force them into segrated toilets, and fire them from Federal employment. We must excuse all that bad behavior because, hey-hey!, it was 1915!

[tompritchett]

Hey guys , lighten up . You put yourself in 1861 all the time .
Put yourself in 1915.

Yes, it would be appropriate to put ourselves in 1915 to understand the context of the film when judging it on its technical merit. The same could be said about the various propaganda films produced in Russia during the Stalin era and in Germany under Goebbel's direction. However, IMHO we should always judge the message of these films with our current set of values and morals.

[5 th Alabama Infantry]

Yes, it would be appropriate to put ourselves in 1915 to understand the context of the film when judging it on its technical merit. The same could be said about the various propaganda films produced in Russia during the Stalin era and in Germany under Goebbel's direction. However, IMHO we should always judge the message of these films with our current set of values and morals.

Actually, we shouldn’t . I believe that it’s been called the concept of presentism. Judging the past by today’s standards is always a bad idea.

[sbl]

Actually, we shouldn’t . I believe that it’s been called the concept of presentism. Judging the past by today’s standards is always a bad idea.

Presentism (literary and historical analysis)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present...rical_analysis)

"Presentism is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. Most modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been in use in this meaning as early as the 1870s. Historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a logical fallacy also known as the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. This interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context, but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present, things which do not seem relevant receive little attention, resulting in a misleading portrayal of the past. "Whig history" or "whiggishness" are often used as synonyms for presentism, particularly when the historical depiction in question is teleological or triumphalist."