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Disney's American Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

SIMON P. NEWMAN
SIMON P. NEWMAN*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of Disney's representations of the American founding in television and movie productions as secondary works; that is, as works of historical interpretation. “The Liberty Story” (1957), Johnny Tremain (1957) and The Swamp Fox (1959–60) are analysed in the context of contemporaraneous historiographical trends. The essay demonstrates that despite certain flaws and weaknesses, Disney's representations sometimes presented innovative themes and insightful interpretations, which at the height of the Cold War influenced popular understanding of the American founding and the society that it produced.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 682 - 715
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

1 Walt Disney's Disneyland ran on ABC from 1954 to 1958: Disney produced the series in order to help fund and promote the California park, which opened in the summer of 1955. Seidel, Jeffrey M., “Financing the Dream Called Disneyland,” Financial History, 77 (2002), 20–26Google Scholar; Jackson, Kathy Merlock and West, Mark I., “Introduction,” in Jackson, Merlock and West, eds., Disneyland and Culture: Essays on the Parks and their Influence (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2011), 1–4Google Scholar.

2 Forbes, Esther, Johnny Tremain: A Novel for Old and Young (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1943)Google Scholar; and Johnny Tremain (dir. Robert Stevenson, Walt Disney Productions, 1957); Lawson, Robert, Ben and Me (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1939)Google Scholar, and “Ben and Me” (dir. Hamilton Luske, Walt Disney Productions, 1953). After the movie theatre release of Johnny Tremain in 1957, Disney broadcast the movie in two parts a year later. Walt Disney introduced each of the two programmes, and in his remarks at the start of the second episode he again referred to the production as being about “the frontier of human liberty.”

3 Walt Disney, “The Liberty Story” (dir. Hamilton Luske and Robert Stevenson), Season 3, Episode 25, of Walt Disney's Disneyland, broadcast 29 May 1957.

4 Gone with the Wind (1939) had brought the history of the American Civil War to film viewers across the globe, setting a new standard for historical costume dramas. The 1940s and 1950s were the glory days for American westerns, from John Ford movies such as Fort Apache (1948), Rio Grande (1950) and The Searchers (1956), to television series such as Davy Crockett (1954–55), The Cisco Kid (1950–56) and Gunsmoke (1955–75). And then World War II provided American moviemakers with a variety of settings and stories, and moviegoers flocked to see films such as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) and To Hell and Back (1955). The one major exception is John Ford's Drums along the Mohawk (1939), although stylistically this was less a movie about the American Revolution than it was Ford's attempt to create an eighteenth-century western, showing settlement and conflict on the frontier. While Liberty Square was planned for Disneyland in California, and was discussed by Disney in his presentation of “The Liberty Story,” this area was never developed in California and was instead built in Florida's Disney World.

5 For examples of studies of Disney which represent him as a fundamentally conservative figure see Schickel, Richard, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968)Google Scholar; and Eliot, Marc, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (New York: Carol, 1993)Google Scholar. In contrast to these see Brode, Douglas, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004)Google Scholar, which asserts that Disney's productions anticipated important aspects of the later 1960s and 1970s.

6 Progressive history dominated much of American history between the 1890s and the early 1920s. Like the social and political Progressives of this era, Progressive historians such as Charles Beard, Carl Becker and John Franklin Jameson emphasized social, class and economic conflict as engines of social change, and as factors in the coming of the American Revolution and of the constitutional settlement with which it ended. Consensus or neo-Whig history refers to a branch of American historiography which dominated American scholarship for approximately two decades following World War II. During the post-World War II period, leading Consensus historians such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, Henry Steele Commager and Edmund Morgan embraced much of the Whiggish interpretation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that when compared with European nations the United States had experienced relatively little meaningful social and class conflict, and that American values and ideals based on British civil rights and liberties had unified the nation and its people. For a discussion of Progressive and Consensus history and the American Revolution see Newman, Simon P. “Writing the History of the American Revolution,” in Stokes, Melvyn, ed., The State of U. S. History (Oxford: Berg), 23–44Google Scholar. For a more general discussion of Progressive and Consensus history across American history see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 47–85, 320–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Walt Disney, introductory remarks, “The Liberty Story.”

10 Luce, 64, 65.

11 For discussion of aspects of these twin roles of movies and television series, see Marcus, Alan S., Celluloid Blackboard: Teaching History with Film (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2007), 1Google Scholar; and Toplin, Robert Brent, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 14–15Google Scholar. See also Rosenstone, Robert A., History on Film/Film on History (Harlow: Pearson, 2006)Google Scholar; Chopra-Gant, Mike, Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (New York: Wallflower, 2008)Google Scholar; O'Connor, John E., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1990)Google Scholar; and Rosenstone, Robert A., Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

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14 Forbes, Esther, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942)Google Scholar; and Forbes, Johnny Tremain. Forbes was awarded the John Newberry Medal for Johnny Tremain. Robert D. Bass received his PhD from the University of South Carolina, and held academic posts at the United States Naval Academy, the University of South Carolina and Furman University. He was the author of Swamp Fox: The Life and Campaigns of General Francis Marion (New York: Holt, 1959)Google Scholar; Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarlton and Mary Robinson (New York: Holt, 1957)Google Scholar.

15 Harry Tytle, who directed a number of Disney's live-action productions during this period, recalled that Disney “insisted on plenty of coverage (that is, great variety of shots that he could choose from in editing a film).” See Tytle, Harry, One of Walt's Boys: An Insider's Account of Disney's Golden Years (Royal Oak, MI: Airtight Seels Allied Production, 1997)Google Scholar, quoted in Barrier, Michael, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 263–64Google Scholar. See also Eldridge, David, Hollywood's History Films (London: I. B. Taurus, 2006), 130–32; SchafferGoogle Scholar.

16 Watts, The Magic Kingdon, 70, 100; Shortsleeve, 18–19.

17 The 1941 strike at the Disney studios by artists protesting against the lack of a union and gross inequalities in the payment of salaries and bonuses had a profound influence on Disney, who was “positively convinced that Communistic agitation, leadership, and activities have brought about this strike.” Walt Disney, “To My Employees on Strike,” Hollywood Reporter, 2 July 1941, reprinted in Sito, Tom, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 137Google Scholar. In 1944 Disney took a leading role in the creation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), serving as the group's first vice president. Despite the fact that the United States was in the midst of a war against Axis fascism, the MPA placed Communism first in the list of enemies who “seek by subversive means” to undermine “the liberty and freedom which generations before us have fought to create and preserve.” “Statement of Principles,” the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers Research Database, at www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/huac_alliance.htm, accessed 18 March 2015. Disney took an even more active stand when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) travelled to Hollywood for a series of hearings intended to gauge Communist influences at work in the motion picture industry. Giving testimony before HUAC, Disney repeated his belief that the strike in his studio had been inspired and supported by Communists. When asked his opinion of the Communist Party, Disney described it “as an un-American thing.” Testimony of Walter E. Disney before HUAC,’ 24 Oct. 1947, Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, 80th Congress, 1st Session, 23–24 Oct. 1947 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1947), digitized by Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/stream/hearingsregardin1947aunit/hearingsregardin1947aunit_djvu.txt, accessed 18 March 2015. See also Gabler, Neal, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 452–53, 535Google Scholar; Schickel, 191, 256; Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 204–25, 240–88.

18 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, Letters from An American Farmer, Describing Certain Provincial Institutions, Manners, and Customs, And Conveying Some Idea of the State of the People of North America (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1793; first published 1782), 46Google Scholar; Disney, “Our American Culture,” quoted in Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 162.

19 There is a rich and growing literature on film and history. See, for example, Burgoyne, Robert, The Hollywood Historical Film (London: Blackwell, 2008)Google Scholar; Chapman, James, Film and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklar, Chopra-Gant; Robert, “Scofflaws and the Historian-Cop,” Reviews in American History, 25, 2 (1997), 346–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History; Rosenstone, Visions of the Past; Rosenstone, Robert A., “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review, 93, 5 (1988), 1173–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Connor, John E., “History in Images/Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film and Television Study for an Understanding of the Past,” American Historical Review, 93, 5 (1988), 1200–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Connor, Image as Artifact; Grindon, Leger, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Toplin, Robert Brent, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Toplin, History by Hollywood.

20 Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, 11–49, 154–64; Marcus, Celluloid Blackboard, 5–6; Holdzkom, 187.

21 Sklar, “Scofflaws and the Historian-Cop”; Eldridge, 128–33; Browne, Ray B., “Foreword,” in Rollins, Peter C., ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), ixGoogle Scholar; Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead: Film and the Challenge of Authenticity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 8, 3 (1988), 269–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Opening scene of “Day of Reckoning,” Episode 4 of The Swamp Fox (dir. Louis King), first broadcast 8 Jan. 1960 as Episode 5 of Series 6 of Walt Disney Presents. Holdzkom, 185; Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 57–60; Carroll, Noel, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus, 114, 4 (1985), 79–103, 82Google Scholar.

23 Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words,” 1173–74; Toplin, History by Hollywood, 12. For a discussion of the role of myth in the telling and understanding of history in America see Sussman, Warren, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 9–11Google Scholar; and Slotkin, Richard, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 3–45Google Scholar; Airlie, Stuart, “Strange Eventful Histories: The Middle Ages in the Cinema,” in Linehan, Peter and Nelson, Janet L., eds., The Medieval World (London: Routledge, 2001), 163–83, 163–64Google Scholar.

24 Becker, Carl L., The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960; first published 1909), 22Google Scholar; Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the American Constitution (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913)Google Scholar.

25 Benjamin Fine, “Textbook Censors Alarm Educators,” New York Times, 25 May 1952, 1; New York State Assembly bill on history, 1923, quoted in Giordano, Gerard, Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars: A History of Advocacy and Opposition (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 30Google Scholar. See also Moreau, Joseph, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Morgan, Edmund S., The Birth of the American Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Savelle, Max, review of Morgan, Birth of the American Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 14, 4 (1957), 618Google Scholar. Morgan's book has never gone out of print, and is currently in its fourth edition.

27 Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar.

28 The Consensus school was first identified and delineated by John Higham; see John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary, 1 Jan. 1959, 93–100; Higham, “The Construction of American History,” in Higham, ed., The Reconstruction of American History (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1962), 9–24Google Scholar; Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. For a more recent assessment of Consensus history see Novick, That Noble Dream.

29 Walt Disney, introductory remarks at beginning of episode one of Johnny Tremain (dir. Robert Stevenson, Walt Disney Productions, 1957), broadcast 21 Nov. 1958 as Episode 8, Series 5 of Walt Disney's Disneyland.

30 Young, Alfred F., “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 38, 4 (1981), 561–623CrossRefGoogle Scholar, later expanded and published as Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

31 Hutchinson, Thomas, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay: From 1749 to 1774 (London: John Murray, 1828), 125Google Scholar. For a discussion of the Liberty Tree in Boston during the Stamp Act crisis see Newman, Simon P., Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 22–25Google Scholar. The best study of the radical significance of the Liberty Tree is Young, Alfred F., Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 325–93Google Scholar.

32 Paine, Thomas, “The Liberty Tree,” in Moore, Frank, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856), 18–20Google Scholar.

33 Tom Blackburn and George Bruns, “Liberty Tree” (Wonderland Music, 1956), “Johnny Tremain” (1957).

34 Hardesty, Jared Ross, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Rachel Klein estimated the enslaved population of South Carolina in 1768 at 82,728. See Klein, Rachel N., Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 20, Table 2Google Scholar. Peter Coclanis has estimated that the total population of South Carolinain 1770 was just over 124,000. See Coclanis, Peter A., The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 84, Tables 3–15Google Scholar. The population estimates for St. John's Berkeley are drawn from David Morton Knepper, “The Political Structure of Colonial South Carolina, 1743–1776,” PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1971, 36.

36 Some key works in African American history were published in the mid-twentieth century, such as Woodson, Carter G., The Negro in Our History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1922)Google Scholar; Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Boston, MA: Stratford Company, 1924)Google Scholar; Bois, Du, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935)Google Scholar; Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1947)Google Scholar. However, works of these kinds were somewhat marginalized in many mid-twentieth-century histories of the American Revolution, which continued to regard the struggle for independence as an exclusively white story. The first edition of Edmund S. Morgan's The Birth of the American Republic was probably the best-selling survey of the American Revolution between the mid-1950s and late-1960s. In it Morgan treated the struggle for independence as an ideological battle over the rights of Englishmen, and it is a story almost entirely populated by white actors. This approach was continued in Bernard Bailyn's Prize-winning, Pulitzer The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and the sophisticated and nuanced analyses of ideas and language framed in entirely white terms of Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

37 Robert Olwell has argued persuasively that South Carolina whites who were determined to defend their freedom to own and profit from slaves were driven into the Patriot camp by a growing fear that Britain was encouraging slave resistance and rebellion in order to maintain control of the southern colonies. See Olwell, Robert, “‘Domestick Enemies’: Slavery and Political Independence in South Carolina, May 1775–March 1776,” Journal of Southern History, 55, 1 (1989), 21–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

38 Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 288. See also Holdzkom, “A Past to Make Us Proud.”

39 “A Case of Treason,” Episode 6 (dir. Louis King), first broadcast 22 Jan. 1960 as Episode 16 of Series 6 of Walt Disney Presents. For more on Disney's portrayal of black characters see Brode, Douglas, Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 68–72Google Scholar. For a more general overview of the television and film characterization of blacks see Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum Press, 2006; first published 1973), 57Google Scholar.

40 “Tory Vengeance,” Episode 3 (dir. Louis King), first broadcast 1 Jan. 1960 as Episode 13, Series 6 of Walt Disney Presents.

41 Ibid.

42 Just as slavery was largely absent from the white Patriot world of Frances Marion and his South Carolina Patriots, so too was acknowledgement of its significance in the ideological foundations of the revolutionary cause. Historians like Edmund Morgan have elaborated on the ways in which racial slavery and ideas about rights and liberty were symbiotically “intertwined and interdependent.” Morgan and others argued that elite white planters could safely champion political rights and even equality in a society in which the vast mass of labourers were enslaved noncitizens, and that this meant that racism and slavery were essential foundations of the republican ideology of the American South. See Morgan, Edmund S., “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History, 59, 1 (1972), 5–29, 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975)Google Scholar. However, these ideas were far from fully developed when the Disney studios produced The Swamp Fox.

43 The 1960s were tremendously important in the development of African American historiography. The rise of the New Social History and its emphasis on the histories of ordinary Americans coincided with the civil rights movement, black pride, and black power, and the development of courses and programmes in black studies in American universities. Major works published in the later 1960s and 1970s included Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper Row, 1971)Google Scholar; Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1974)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974)Google Scholar; Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Gutman, Herbert, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976)Google Scholar. For an analysis of the development of this new historiography see Harris, Robert L. Jr., “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” Journal of Negro History, 67, 2 (1982), 107–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 “Brother against Brother,” Episode 2 (dir. Harry Keller), first broadcast 30 Oct. 1959 as Episode 5, Series 6 of Walt Disney Presents; Disney, introduction to “Day of Reckoning.”

45 “A Case of Treason”; “A Woman's Courage,” Episode 7 (dir. Lewis R. Foster), first broadcast 8 Jan. 1961 as Episode 11 of Series 7 of Walt Disney Presents; “Horses for Greene,” Episode 8 (dir. Lewis R. Foster), first broadcast 15 Jan. 1961 as Episode 12 of Series 7 of Walt Disney Presents. The first major works on American women of the Revolutionary era were Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1980)Google Scholar.

46 See, for example, Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 70–72, 287–88; Schickel, The Disney Version, 48.

47 Holdzkom, 184–85.

48 “Redcoat Strategy,” Episode 5 (dir. Louis King), first broadcast 15 Jan. 1960 as Episode 15, Series 5 of Walt Disney Presents.

49 “Tory Vengeance.”

50 See, for example, Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 204–27, 240–88; Holdzkom, 184–87.

51 Disney, introduction to “Brother against Brother”; Disney, introduction to “Day of Reckoning.”

52 Shy, John, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

53 Announcer's comments in trailer for Episode 2 at the end of Episode 1, “The Birth of the Swamp Fox.”

54 The Story of Robin Hood (dir. Ken Annakin, 1952). This movie was then broadcast on television in two parts on 2 and 9 Nov. 1955 as Episodes 8 and 9 of Walt Disney's Disneyland.

55 Walt Disney, “The Liberty Story.”

56 Hobsbawm, E. J., Bandits (Worcester: Trinity Press, 1969)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 9, “The Bandit as Symbol”, 109–115. For a survey of subsequent historical work on this topic see Seal, Graham, “The Robin Hood Principle: Folklore, History, and the Social Bandit,” Journal of Folklore Research, 46, 1 (2009), 67–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 3–45. See also Manning, Martin J., “The American Revolution and Disney: Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain and the Celebration of Liberty,” in Jackson, Kathy Merlock and West, Mark I., eds., Walt Disney, From Reader to Storyteller: Essays on the Literary Inspirations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2015), 92–99Google Scholar; Sussman, Culture as History, 9–11; and Toplin, History by Hollywood, 12–13.

58 John Adams, HBO mini-series (dir. Tom Hooper, 2008); Turn: Washington's Spies, AMC series (various directors, 2014–); Hamilton (dir. Thomas Kail, 2015–) opened at the Richard Rogers Theater in August 2015.

59 McCullough, David, John Adams (New York: Touchstone, 2001)Google Scholar; Rose, Alexander, Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring (New York: Bantam, 2006)Google Scholar; Chernow, Ron, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004)Google Scholar.

60 Morgan, The Birth of the American Republic; Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, “Slavery,” 232–46; Wood, Creation of the American Republic. Bailyn included one other female name in his index, Silence Dogood, an early alias of Benjamin Franklin.

61 “Brother against Brother.”