Word: klan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...It’s like writing history with lightning,” Woodrow Wilson said of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation that pays homage to the Ku Klux Klan, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true...
...after Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 play on which the film is based, the film’s adopted title does little to hide its true subject, a three-hour epic of the Civil War, post-war Southern Reconstruction, and development of the Ku Klux Klan...
Rather than healing old wounds, Northern-dictated efforts at Reconstruction humiliate and defraud the Camerons further and incite Ben Cameron to create the Ku Klux Klan in order to avenge his homeland’s lost honor...
...controversial climactic scene of the film cross-cuts Klansmen riding to the rescue of a virtuous white women being menaced by her crafty, sexualized biracial servant and another white family being threatened by their slaves. The audience is induced to conclude that the Klan is a force for good, contrary to oppressive Northern Reconstruction and its unfair distribution of powers to blacks...
Appealing to nostalgia for the days of the Old South, The Birth of a Nation was, and still is, used as KKK propaganda to recruit new members. The emotions evoked were so strong that Klan membership peaked in the ten years following the film’s cinematic release...