Watching historical movies in history class is very beneficial to learning. A movie makes ideas easier to understand and creates a meaningful and relatable connection to the event. Reading information or getting lectured is not very engaging to a student, while watching a movie makes a student eager to learn. Historical movies such as Glory and 12 Years a Slave do a great job of allowing the watcher to explore real events as well as understand circumstances and attitudes of the people during that time. Both of these movies focus on very important parts of pre-Civil War US history, and you can learn a lot about this time by simply watching these movies and doing a little bit of research. These films were both very successful and proven to be mostly historically accurate.

 The movie Glory is about one of the very first African American regiments. They were called the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry, and were led by a white man named Robert Gould Shaw. According to Reelviews review of Glory, it was “…one of the best movies ever made about the American Civil War,” and it was, “…mostly historically accurate… a great deal of effort went into getting the details correct.” In my research I found very few inaccuracies within this film, and a small one that was pointed out to me in an article on cwmemory.com was that the regiment “is presented primarily as a unit of fugitive slaves… but it was mostly made up of free blacks from Massachusetts.” This false detail was portrayed in the movie to emphasize the message of the story that they all had something to fight for. By presenting the regiment as a unit of fugitive slaves, it increases our view of the intensity of their desires to defeat slavery since they have been through it themselves. Although it is not true it highlights a major idea of the Civil War that the slaves were willing to do anything for their freedom. Other than this the film presents very important and factual events that the regiment was involved in. The major events of this movie include the boycott of the wages, the burning of Darien Georgia, and the attack on Fort Wagner. These were all shown accurately within this film. It does a great job of depicting the events that the regiment went through, and along the way you grow attached to the characters and end up wanting to know more about them. Watching intense historical movies like this one makes learning about historical events very easy and encourages further research.  (add about how the whites and blacks were threatened with death for participating but stayed/not respected by whites/brotherhood/ and better conclusion)

Another very famous movie about this time is 12 Years a Slave. This movie was originally a book written by Solomon Northup. He was a free man that got kidnapped and traded illegally as a slave. On the Huffington Post I found a quote from the director, Steve McQueen that said, “If I was to illustrate the book – it would be for more worse than what I filmed. If you count the incidences of violence you can see- it’s not that many scenes…but it feels like so much more. I’m very proud of it because I can’t back off things like that. It’s about slavery.” This shows that while making the movie his main purpose was to truly inform the people of what Northup went through as well as emphasize the many terrible aspects of slavery. In this movie there were also very few inaccuracies, and they were only added to create a stronger story. In my research I found that the only scene in the movie that was not in the book was when a slave got murdered on the ship when he tried to stop a sailor from raping an enslaved woman. Although this did not happen, it was included to show that things like this did happen to slaves and emphasize how terrible their lives were and that the white people got away with treated them like that. The movie does a great job of accurately showing the life of Solomon Northup as well as bringing up major incidence that were common within slave life. (add that they depicted his biography right / jealousy of slaves from wives / children get taken away / illegal trade )

Both of these movies did a great job of accurately displaying US History. They were also both very successful. According to IMBD, Glory was rated 7.9/ 10 stars and had a gross of $26,830,000, and 12 Years a Slave was rated 8.1/10 stars and had a gross of $56,667,870. (finish this)