I know the title sounds a bit crazy. Just how can the Civil War be related to popular culture in anyway? Well just stop and think about it. Movies, books, TV Shows, and many other forms of entertainment often draw directly from the Civil War. The most recent, and probably most visible example of this would be Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.
Lincoln is a highly visible and critically acclaimed movie about the last 3 months of Abraham Lincoln's time as President of the United States. I'm trying not to spoil anything, but if you know anything about American History then you probably have a good idea of how the story goes... And unfortunately ends. I saw the film with my girlfriend and a friend of hers, both of whom have little to no interest in history. That being said they still enjoyed the film, probably as much as I did, if for different reasons.
Anyways, the point of this post was mostly to direct attention to an article that was published on cnn.com about a week ago. I've included a link here.
The article points to some historical inaccuracies in the film, which is all fine and dandy in its own right. Historians love to argue about whether a movie is accurate and they bicker when things are wrong. On some levels its ok for historians to complain and argue about this. They want the public to be educated AND have correct information. After all, it seems that a large amount of people only get their historical knowledge from media in some way (whether thats Ken Burns or South Park isn't up to me!). However, their is also the argument that the purpose of popular media is not to be historically accurate, rather it is to entertain the consumer, something that a movie like Lincoln certainly achieved.
I don't want to pass an opinion on this one way or another, I just thought it was something worthy of conversation. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, who am I to get in the way of that?
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