- The Significance of the Last Stand
- By Douglas Damian McKerns, with comment by Lisa Wright
What do historians create with the history they account? History is a story that never ends. The events of the present in essence have already happened in the past. Historians try to make sense of the present by deconstructing the past. Only through analysis of the past can one understand the present. I remember playing cowboys and Indians as a child. I would always play the part of the cowboys, and consequently the cowboys always won. At the end of my day's adventure I went to my parents to tell them of my conquest against the Indians. I made certain to include every detail of the battle -- from first charge to last saber stroke. History was made that day in my backyard with the green figurine--soldier on horseback--whose defeat of the...
- Neither Hero nor Villain
- By Lisa Wright
If history could speak (I mean, literally speak), it might ask itself: Was George Armstrong Custer a hero or villain? And, furthermore, does it really matter? Obviously, these would be extremely relevant questions to ask, as history itself could not hope to inherently know the answer to such queries. History was not there when Custer was on the battlefield at Little Bighorn. It was waiting in the wings for the battle to be over so that it could make its entrance.
- Custer Histroy according to Hutton
- By Lisa Wright
The title [They Died with Their Boots On] was from Thomas Ripley’s 1935 popular history of western gunfighters, a property purchased by Warner Brothers but never developed. It was a major film for Warners, with $1,357,000 eventually budgeted for production. The original script by Wally Kline and Aeneas Mackenzie clearly was influenced by the [Frederic F.] Van de Water biography [Glory Hunter: A Life of General Custer (1934)], but the studio decided to rewrite the script to better fit the Flynn persona. Associate producer Robert Fellows properly characterized it as a “fairy tale, with no attempt at adherence to historical fact.†Still, screenwriter Lenore Coffee, called in to punch up the romantic scenes between...
