Beth Lewis Pardoe: Why are There No Good Films on the Early Mid-Atlantic?

I give a hearty amen to Beth’s complaint about the lack of good historical movies on the colonial mid-Atlantic.  I would love to see a film that centered, for example, around the life of Conrad Wieser.

Or how about A Midwife’s Tale-like documentary on the exciting life of Philip Vickers Fithian?  Such a drama could feature college life at Princeton on the eve of the Revolution, wild dogs jumping through cabin windows on the Pennsylvania frontier, a torrid love triangle between Philip, Elizabeth Beatty, and one “Rodman,” the dumping of East India tea in the town of Greenwich, and a tragic death in the wake of the Battle of Harlem Heights.  (Intrigued? You can find these stories and more in The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in America).

Here is a taste of Beth’s post at the blog of The Historical Society:

Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist.   

New England’s comparative simplicity garners it a disproportionate amount of attention. The Pilgrims and Paul Revere bookend schoolchildren’s understanding of colonial history, with a brief pause for the horrors of Salem and slavery. Thus our politicians and the voters who elect them imagine a past of Protestant purity marred by slavery and superstition. Historians seek to disabuse students of this dangerous misperception. However, in a visual age, we need the assistance of historical films.

RECOMMENDED READING

LONG FORM: Frederick Douglass and the Challenge of Seeing Clearly On the slaveholder Jonathan Edwards and the Christians who read him The Author’s Corner with Edward Pompeian What should a college graduate know about slavery?