I Saw It at the Movies: History and Film on #MicroblogMonday

Meryl Streep and Robert deNiro, Best Picture for 1978
Meryl Streep and Robert deNiro, Best Picture for 1978

I saw The Normal Heart, then Love is Strange — with no premeditation, both in the same week.

Each is a great document of a time in our history.  I began thinking about the power of these films and how valuable they would be as teaching tools.  With that in mind, I hereby initiate the “films to teach American history by” list.  Here are some more of mine; please add your own in the comments.

Kramer v Kramer      Hair     Do the Right Thing     The Deerhunter

Bullworth     Dead Man Walking     Valley of Decision     Gentleman’s Agreement

Good Night and Good Luck     The Green Berets     Get on the Bus     The Pawnbroker

 

 

 

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

4 thoughts on “I Saw It at the Movies: History and Film on #MicroblogMonday”

  1. I love Kramer vs. Kramer. I would add I Heart Huckabees to this list. Recent history, but it still sums up a feeling in America during a certain time period of consumerism.

  2. Some (all) of the later books from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series takes place in the US around 1976 and beyond. And Scotland and France too! I’ve learned some and enjoyed my time doing it. 🙂

    Out of your list, I think I’ve only seen Hair.

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