What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right

[redstar826]

- He used the N-word and told racist jokes. He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites. He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa

Comments

[othellia]

Yeah, I assumed from someone's earlier comment up thread that it'd already passed, and by the time I noticed your that one had passed as well. PBS did upload it to their website though, so I finally got some time to watch it today and it was totally worth it.

TBH, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were my history crushes as a kid. It was kind of cool with FD's segments since they took pretty much all of his dialogue/narration straight from the pages of his autobiography. (Which if you haven't read it, I would definitely recommend. He apologizes at one point for not being as eloquent or well-spoken as his peers, but all that means to me is that it ends up reading like a modern piece of literature. I should however warn - despite warnings being rather obvious - that his narrative does paint a lot of vivid and horrific imagery.)

The actor they got to play WLG was a dead ringer, and I found it especially fascinating how they followed his decent into pseudo-anarchism, since that tended to be glossed over in a lot of my old research.

Also I'd never hear of Angelina Grimké Weld, so she was amazingly cool. I love how she was pretty much a walking poster child for intersectionality back then.

I'm also fascinated to see the upcoming John Brown segments if they end up covering the raid on Harper's Ferry since my middle school went there on a field trip once back when I was still living in DC. (OMG, I remember the teachers had us crayon rubbing off details from old 150 year+ tombstones.)

Can't wait for the next parts.

[jenny_jenkins]

WLG and Douglass and Weld - it was their life's work. Their whole lives.

And because of them, I am so disdainful of the "it was just like that back then and no one knew differently." No, it wasn't. People knew better. Maybe they weren't brave enough to say differently (it still happens now - with anti-war movements, anti-child-labour movements, any movement really) and maybe they couldn't bring themselves to care because they were too self-absorbed (that hasn't changed either) but everyone knew it was WRONG.

Have you ever read Douglass's autobiography. I read that and I cried so hard. It's so beautiful and high-flown (you know how Victorians wrote!) and when I finished reading it, I didn't even get up, I just read it again. It's not very long. It was a very, very slender book. But it was the most powerful thing I'd ever read.

I CANNOT WAIT for John Brown. I was born in Virginia (kinda by accident - I'm actually a German in Canada) and on a trip back my parents took me there and to a number of civil war battlefields, and Appomattox (we had friends living nearby) and then we went to Gettysburg - the most awesome experience ever. I'd studied the battle (I was a highly obsessive 12 year old) but to actually see the ground. It makes it real.

One thing they are really acing with this PBS thing is the link to the women's rights movement - how it became entwined. You had someone like Grimke Weld only thinking about abolition, but then being told to shut up because she was "just a woman" and then realizing that perhaps her rights were important too.

I think of Sojournor Truth, for example. I'm sure you've read her "Ain't I a woman" speech - it's so powerful how she exposes the hypocrisy of treating women like infants and weak little things but then forcing her to work in the fields and selling off her children. It's so beautiful and powerful.

<3 I hope you enjoy the episode on Tuesday. I've cleared that space already!