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SERIES TWO: 1876-1929 |
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1877: Grand Army of Starvation Savage Acts: Wars, Fairs and Empire Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War
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For two weeks in the summer of 1877 the United States was brought to a standstill. A nationwide rebellion quickly spread along the country's railroad lines. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans--white and black, native- and foreign-born, employed and unemployed--all outraged by the excesses of the giant railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. Police, state militia and, finally, federal troops clashed with strikers and sympathizers in towns and cities across the country, leaving over one hundred dead and thousands wounded. The Great Uprising shaped the beliefs of a generation of Americans, marking the end of the nation's first century and inaugurating a new era of conflict over the meaning of America in the industrial age. Narrated by James Earl Jones, 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation vividly portrays this little-known yet critical event in U.S. history.
Directed by Stephen Brier, Art direction: Joshua Brown, Editor: Charles Musser, Script: Joshua Brown, Stephen Brier and Nancy Musser
Second Prize, 1986 National Educational Film Festival; Silver Award, 1986 Houston Film Festival; Certificate of Merit, 1985 Chicago Film Festival
Journal of American History
"[1877] mixes fascinating detail and violence-filled drama with information describing the political and economic context of post-Civil War America. But what makes the film most striking is [its use of] animation based on images of the time. [The film's] animators skillfully drew characters out of old [engravings and] lithographs . . . both to explain the strikers' perspective and to reveal the stereotypes by which they were presented in the mass media of the time."
Pat Aufderheide, In These Times
"1877 is a tremendously creative film, filled with spirit, informed by serious scholarship, and addressing an important and overlooked historical event with a fresh perspective."
Film and History
"To see this film is to enter a world of marvelous colors and remarkable drawings . . . Then you realize that the most violent incident in American labor history, and one of the most important ever, has just been carefully explained. . . . Don't go see 1877 because you think you need a history lesson . . . Go because you want to see what a vanished industrial world looks like, and how a revolutionary moment in America feels."
Paul Buhle, The Guardian
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U.S. overseas expansion at the turn of the century was not just the concern of government and business; it was also the stuff of everyday life. Savage Acts tells the story of how the Philippine War and American domestic culture forged a new U.S. foreign policy. Soldiers' letters, world's fair exhibitions, early films, travel guides, and heroic monuments expressed a growing sense of a national mission based on ideas of racial superiority. But the victory of imperialist policies was not inevitable: expansion, and its representations in the daily life of the nation, encountered opposition both at home and abroad.
Directed by Pennee Bender, Joshua Brown and Andrea Ades Vasquez
Bronze Apple, 1996 National Educational Media Network Festival; Finalist, 1996 Houston Film Festival
Walter LaFeber, Noll Professor of History, Cornell University
"This provocative film, filled with fresh images and sometimes chilling commentaries of American turn-of-the-century imperialism, will stimulate classroom discussion."
Emily Rosenberg, author of Spreading the American Dream: American Ecomonic and Culture Expansion, 1890-1945 .
"Important and timely, Savage Acts makes its own contribution to this field by combining the wars and fairs more closely and thereby bringing interacion between foreign policy and domestic culture into sharper focus." H-AmStdy Review
Jim Zwick, editor of Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War.
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Framed by the story of the1909 shirtwaist strike, Heaven interweaves the narrative of the "Uprising of the 20,000" with vignettes that explore a multifaceted urban society and culture. Through the experiences of its protagonists--young Jewish and Italian working women--the program addresses a range of subjects, including immigration and intergenerational conflict; "romance" and sexual victimization; ethnic tensions and racial discrimination; women's fashions and industrial conflict; and the creation of a new culture of consumerism and entertainment. Heaven combines motion picture footage, archival photos, animation, and computer graphics to present the panoramic world of immigrant working women in the turn-of-the-century city.
Directed by Joshua Brown, Andrea Ades Vasquez and Pennee Bender
1993 American Historical Association John E. O'Connor Film Award; Silver Hugo, Chicago Film Festival Intercom '93; Silver Medal, 1993 New York Festivals.
Citation, 1993 American Historical Association John E. O'Connor Film Award
"Heaven combines impressive scholarship with the visual sophistication of MTV. The result is a strikingly vivid slice of labor history, in which the 'working girls' come to life as fully realized, three-dimensional human beings."
Barbara Ehrenreich
"Seen vividly through the eyes of teenaged strikers, this extraordinary film captures the story not only of the shirtwaist strike but of growing up in 1909 New York City, working at a garment factory, flirting with boys, and, most of all, sharing with friends the excitement and the fears of this momentous event. See this film and show it to a nineteen year old."
Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle
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Up South: African American Migration in the Era of the Great War completes the second WBA? video series. Narrated by a Mississippi barber and a sharecropper woman who organized migration clubs to Chicago, Up South portrays the dramatic story of movement, self transformation and collective action during the exodus from the South to industrial cities during World War I. Letters, oral histories, songs, photographs, and art convey how southern black culture and traditions helped sustain migrants as they rejected the oppression and indignity of the Jim Crow South. But the "promised land" proved to be a complex and contentious cityscape. The rise of black politics, racial violence and the July 1919 race riot, women's club and church activities, the industrial workplace, and the "New Negro" are some of the issues and events explored in the program.
Directed by Andrea Ades Vasquez, Pennee Bender and Joshua Brown
"Up South offers a fresh perspective on the Great Migration. By allowing the migrants to tell their own stories, the filmmakers have brilliantly transformed a classic migration tale into a touching, deeply personal narrative of hope, survival and resistance."
Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History, NYU and author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics,
and the Black Working Class
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ORDERING WHO BUILT AMERICA? SERIES TWO VIDEOS
Each program in the second series is available in 1/2" VHS format for $75.00 each plus $12.00 shipping and handling. Each video comes with one copy of a viewers guide that may be reproduced without charge. Orders should be directed to:
Purchasing Department 99 Hudson Street, Third Floor New York, N.Y. 10013 tel: 212-966-4248 x201 fax:212-966-4589 Or e-mail ASHP for more information |