Illuminating Forgotten Pasts

Like it or not, more and more Americans learn much of their history from movies and television. Fact or fiction, accurate or distorted, these images form our collective images of times past.

“Amistad,” the new Steven Spielberg movie, is introducing millions to a powerful chapter of American history that was not taught in most classrooms. It tells the story of an 1839 uprising on a slave ship and the subsequent legal battle to free the African captives, and it does not pretend to be a documentary.

The dramatization, however, does authentically portray the passions of those times and how the human cargo of the Amistad was finally freed through its own heroic efforts and the powerful legal argument made by a former American president, John Quincy Adams, before the U.S. Supreme Court. The film and the media coverage it is garnering should encourage students and other viewers to learn more about the event and about John Quincy Adams, a president who is receiving new respect and attention after being known mainly as the son of the second president, John Adams.

American history is full of underexposed gems. Take the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the subject of the Civil War film “Glory.” We think of the war in terms of Lincoln, Davis, Lee and Grant, but “Glory” opened a rarely seen chapter in the conflict, one involving fugitive slaves, ex-slaves and freemen who fought against the Confederacy.

Some highly fictionalized motion pictures can be mistakenly taken as the literal retelling of facts, say “JFK” or “The Babe Ruth Story.” But when filmmakers illuminate little-known bits of history and bring it to a wider public, they are like cinematic prospectors, bringing to the rest of us new treasures worthy of appreciation.