American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution in American History

The American Revolution at the Movies Notes

  1. American Film Institute Catalog, “Bowling Green,” https://catalog.afi.com/Film/41338-BOWLING-GREEN.
  2. Mike Fleming Jr., “Disney Paid $75 Million for Worldwide Movie Rights to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’; Biggest Film Acquisition Deal Ever?,” Deadline, February 3, 2020, https://deadline.com/2020/02/disney-paid-75-million-hamilton-movie-deal-lin-manuel-miranda-largest-film-acquisition-ever-1202849929/.
  3. See the advertisement for The Spy in The Billboard, May 30, 1914, 52, Internet Archive, https://ia801909.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?id=sim_billboard_1914-05-30_26_22&itemPath=%2F12%2Fitems%2Fsim_billboard_1914-05-30_26_22&server=ia801909.us.archive.org&page=leaf00053.
  4. Wilson probably didn’t say it, per Mark E. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 509–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20799409.
  5. Todd McCarthy, “The Patriot,” Variety, June 16, 2000, https://variety.com/2000/film/reviews/the-patriot-2-1200462809/.
  6.  John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854.
  7. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, VA, 1774).
  8. Wanting to think about narrative conventions within a standard cinematic time frame is my excuse for sweeping prestige TV serial dramas like John Adams and even Turn: Washington’s Spies off the stage here.
  9. America, directed by D. W. Griffith (D. W. Griffith Productions, 1924).
  10. Drums Along the Mohawk, directed by John Ford (Twentieth Century Fox, 1939).
  11. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Frank Lloyd (Frank Lloyd Productions and Columbia Pictures, 1940).
  12. The Time of Their Lives, directed by Charles Barton (Universal Pictures, 1946).
  13. Like, a lot.
  14. Sweet Liberty, directed by Alan Alda (Universal Pictures, 1986).
  15. Sing it, brother. I still remember the cocktail party, in the 1980s, when I told some business folk that I studied 17th-century New England. “You mean, like, Cotton Mather???” Indeed.
  16. American culture where—spoiler alert—the South won.
  17. There is no easy way to get reliable data, but searching for courses with “American Revolution” or “Civil War” in their titles on CollegeTransfer.Net, which tells college transfer applicants where they might find courses on subjects of interest, offers a reasonable kludge. AcademyOne, CollegeTransfer.Net, website, https://www.collegetransfer.net/.
  18. History News Network, “American Revolution Center Releases National Survey Results: 83 Percent of U.S. Adults Fail Test on Nation’s Founding,” December 3, 2009, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/american-revolution-center-releases-national-surve.
  19. National Assessment of Educational Progress, “NAEP Report Card: U.S. History,” https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/. For questions, see National Assessment of Educational Progress, Questions Tool, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/nqt/searchquestions.
  20. Sweet Liberty, directed by Alda.
  21. Sweet Liberty, directed by Alda.
  22. For a generation, we’ve seen this principle operate in reverse, in the growth of the Marvel and DC Comics cinematic universes: If it packs the theaters, make it again.
  23. Eammon Jacobs, “‘The Lord of the Rings’ Made Almost $3 Billion at the Box Office—so You Might Be Surprised by How Much Its Actors Got Paid,” Business Insider, September 17, 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/lord-of-the-rings-cast-salaries-pay-2024-9.
  24. Benedict Nightingale, “A Yankee Revolution in England,” The New York Times, July 14, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/14/movies/a-yankee-revolution-in-england.html.
  25. Revolution, directed by Hugh Hudson (Goldcrest Films International and Viking Films, 1985).
  26. Denby quoted in David Wolf, “Pacino: Master of the Method,” Financial Review, May 9, 2014, https://www.afr.com/politics/pacino-master-of-the-method-20140314-ixkws.
  27. Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, ed. Lawrence Grobel (Gallery Books, 2006), 182–83.
  28. The Numbers, “Revolution (1985),” Nash Information Services, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Revolution.
  29. Rotten Tomatoes, “Revolution,” https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1028715-revolution.
  30. Al Pacino, 182–83.
  31. Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s 2001 Movie and Video Guide (Plume, 2001), 1169.
  32. The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich (Columbia Pictures, 2000).
  33. Fischer, quoted in Thomas Doherty, “At Last, Our Revolution Done Right,” The Boston Globe, July 16, 2000, E2.
  34. Box Office Mojo, “The Patriot,” IMDbPro, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3244918273/weekly/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs.
  35. I have written elsewhere at some length about 1776. See Jane Kamensky, “The 1776 Project,” October 13, 2022, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/1776-musical-broadway-founding-fathers/671717/.
  36. Adams to Niles, February 13, 1818.
  37. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 357.
  38. See, for instance, US Census Bureau, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900, June 1909, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1909/decennial/century-populaton-growth.html.
  39. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, “Letter III—What Is an American,” in Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782), https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/letter_03.asp.
  40. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Oxford University Press, 1982).
  41. In Robert G. Parkinson’s The Common Cause, the revolutionary cause is made common only by summoning racial rhetorics against black and Native Americans. Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute, 2016). See also Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W. W. Norton, 2016).
  42. Carl Lotus Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (University of Wisconsin, 1909), 22.
  43. Drums Along the Mohawk, directed by Ford.
  44. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Lloyd.
  45. Drums Along the Mohawk, directed by Ford.
  46. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Lloyd.
  47. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Lloyd.
  48. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Lloyd.
  49. The Howards of Virginia, directed by Lloyd.
  50. The brilliant historian Kathleen DuVal is working on a new book about Yorktown. Maybe the movie will follow.
  51. 1776, directed by Peter H. Hunt (Columbia Pictures, 1972).