This is one of three pilot class e-portfolios at Agnes Scott College. “Writing History With Lightning”: Southern History Through Film is a first-year seminar taught by Professor Tammy Ingram. Students will post analyses of the films seen in class, comment on one another’s interpretations, and brainstorm for their final writing assignment, a proposal for a film that they imagine. This blog is a space to engage course material and connect with communities outside of class. It will also present the growth that each student acheives in her writing and thinking throughout the course.
Course description:
After a private White House screening of the nation’s first major feature-length film, Birth of a Nation, President (and former history professor) Woodrow Wilson exclaimed, “It’s like writing history with lightning!” In the century since, film has written and rewritten history time and again. Many people, for instance, learned all they know about the Civil War from the film Glory. Others may not have taken a single American History course, but they’ve seen Forrest Gump. Still others feel they know a great deal about Scottish patriot William Wallace because they’ve seen Braveheart. Each of these films contains elements of both truth and fiction and, like it or not, they’ve had a tremendous impact on the way the public thinks about specific historical events. In this course, we will view a variety of films about the South—from documentaries to popular feature films to films based on real events—in order to explore the myriad ways that different genres inform our understanding of the past. Rather than simply judge films according to their (perceived) truthfulness, we will consider what kind of truth each film conveys.
In an article students will be reading for this course, Robert Rosenstone argues that historians should not hold films to the same expectations as written texts. As different mediums, they require different approaches from those of us using them to better understand the past. With that in mind, we will view the films in this course not in chronological order according to subject matter, but according to when they were made. This will help us both to understand how concurrent events impacted filmmaking and to interrogate the ways the South has been constructed (and reconstructed) over the past century.
I’m confused. How do I upload my bio? Do I just post it in the comments?