Dr. Muhammed Erkan Karabekmez
Back in my undergrad years, watching Mel Gibson’s The Patriot raised some questions in my mind. We were constantly exposed to Hollywood’s period films, but I had no clear chronology of American history. At some point, they had massacred Native Americans; at another, they brought in slaves from Africa. Then there was that war between the blue and gray uniforms. In The Patriot, American settlers were fighting the British, whereas in The Last of the Mohicans, they were fighting the French. We had consumed all the historical tropes—gold rushes, cowboys, Apaches—but I lacked a timeline that could answer the basic question: “Who are these Americans?” with proper historical context.
Thus began my enthusiasm to read up on American history. This was before Google was invented, so my initial research was rather primitive—and soon hit a wall. There was no proper book on American history translated into Turkish. Aside from a couple of thin volumes published by leftist publishers, mostly themed around the “brotherhood of peoples,” the only full-length translated work was a book translated in the 1950s by Professor Halil İnalcık in his youth. It had only two editions in over forty years (till my undergrad years) and presented Native Americans as animal like creatures crawling on all fours—an awful artifact of “official American history” (though understandable for its time).
Just as I was about to give up hope, I found what I was looking for—not in a proper history book, but in Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which, within the framework of neocon ideology, provided the very answers I had been seeking. Thankfully, I had access to the Boğaziçi University library, where I could reach a wide range of English sources. Still, it puzzled me that a society so heavily Americanized had such a limited body of Turkish literature on the West. Let alone original works, there wasn’t even an intellectual or academic community capable of bringing two or three decent books on U.S. history into Turkish.
I don’t know the current state of this literature; it must have improved since then, but I imagine it’s still far from where it should be. In any case, I’m not going to write an original history of the U.S., but I can offer a rough historical framework through period films. I’m no film critic, so the list may be flawed from an artistic standpoint. I’m not even a cinephile—I haven’t watched some of the listed films in their entirety. Naturally, the list will be incomplete. I don’t have the energy to ensure even genre consistency. Prepare yourself for a patchwork list. After all, the goal here isn’t cinema—it’s popular history, and of the most vulgar kind.
We’ll start in the 1600s, since that’s when the first migrations of “founding fathers” from England to what is now the northeastern U.S. (New England) began. The famous Pocahontas story belongs to this period, and our first film is a Pocahontas adaptation: The New World (2005). Once they had secured a foothold by carrying out the first massacres of Native Americans, one of the settlers’ first orders of business was to begin witch hunts. I don’t know exactly why, but these highly conservative “founding fathers” committed almost every crime (from massacring Native Americans to burning mentally ill women as witches and practicing racism against Black people) under religious justification. There are many horror films about witch hunts, but in terms of historical depiction, The Crucible (1996) stands out.
We can now move into the 1700s. As British colonial expansion pushed southward, clashes began with French colonies. By “southward,” I still mean the southern part of the eastern U.S. The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is a classic from the period when Hollywood finally began to treat Native Americans as real people. The story takes place during the Seven Years’ War in the mid-1700s, in which Indigenous people also participated.
We now come to American independence from Britain, which of course wasn’t bloodless. The Patriot (2000), which I mentioned at the beginning and stars the infamously anti-British Mel Gibson, covers this period. The events occur in 1776.
The founding of the U.S. coincides with the Industrial Revolution. The North (what is now the New York–Boston corridor) industrialized rapidly, while the South remained agrarian. Black slaves, brought from Africa for centuries, were ideal for agriculture but became obsolete in factories. As the newly formed country began to diverge economically along the North–South axis, the first conflicts emerged around the issue of slavery. Amistad (1997) stands out as one of the most successful propaganda films aimed at sanitizing America’s past involvement in the slave trade. The events take place in 1839. Although it tells the story in a far more stylized and caricatured manner, Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) is also quite effective in portraying the social status of Black people and visually depicting Malcolm X’s concept of the “house Negro.” Chronologically, this film also corresponds to the mid-1800s.
Another major event in the 1800s was America’s westward expansion. However, the first settlers who moved inland lived like vagabonds and established lawless, brutal towns. The “Wild West” setting—where the strong dominated the weak and government authority was hardly felt—emerged from this. Cowboys were, of course, the main characters. They frequently clashed with Native Americans as Americans pushed westward. These massacres were not limited to a specific geography or time period; they occurred across every inch of the U.S. and spanned over 250 years.
The mid-1800s saw many important events in U.S. history, most notably the Civil War, and thus has been the subject of many period films. Speaking of cowboy movies, even though it’s not really a period film, or even an American film despite its stars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) had to be on this list. The backdrop features a satirical depiction of the American Civil War (1861–1865), which ultimately erupted between the North and the South. In understanding modern American politics, the Civil War is arguably the most crucial event. Even today, one can find people who reference Southern symbols either positively or negatively. There are numerous Civil War films from the victorious Northern perspective; Glory (1989), starring Denzel Washington, is among the most significant. Abraham Lincoln, president during the Civil War, is considered the second founder of the U.S. for his role in defeating the Southern secessionists and abolishing slavery. His life, ending in assassination, is the subject of Lincoln (2012), which rightfully makes the list.
While cowboys roamed the Wild West and South Carolina and North Carolina burned in civil strife, farther north, where industrialization was taking root, older and newer immigrant groups were forming gangs and clashing with one another. Gangs of New York (2002) depicts this period. Another must-include classic is Dances with Wolves (1990), a Civil War–era story of repentance over the Native American massacres.
American history, our film list and this article, all can be divided into two parts: pre–Civil War and post–Civil War.