One-Man Show
Seventy-five years ago today, the film version of Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta. It remains one of the most beloved classics in American cinema and holds the number six spot on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of 100 Greatest American Films. Cast, crew and history concur that the daunting task of transforming book-to-film would have been impossible without the passion and drive of one man, producer David O. Selznick. Flying in the face of naysayers insisting costume epics were passé and that civil war movies always lost money, Selznick Studios paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell’s phenomenally successful bestseller only a month after publication. The book, not incidentally, was first entitled Tomorrow Is Another Day and had a...
Read MoreNot a Black and/or White Issue
It’s another of history’s dirty little secrets. While black slavery in this country is well documented, there is little said about its white counterpart. If mentioned at all, white slavery usually masquerades under the broad labels of “indentured servitude” and the “convict trade.” (The word “slave” originally referred to the Slavs of Eastern Europe who were in bondage off and on for centuries.) Gypsies and the Chinese were also victims of forced labor in this country, and the rarely acknowledged enslavement of California’s Mission Indians by the Spanish padres was the subject of my book, Communion of Sinners. Our historians’ biased insistence on ignoring this ugly reality deserves to be rectified. In the 1600s,...
Read MoreBrave New World
Louisiana’s Cane River Colony was a daring dream made real by an ex-slave named Marie Thérèse Coincoin. The facts about her astonishing achievement have been wildly compromised over the centuries, but what I’ve set down here is true enough. Marie was born in 1742 to African slave parents in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and bore four children, fathers unknown. She was eventually leased to a Frenchman, Claude Pierre Metoyer, a union producing ten more issue. In 1778, Metoyer bought and freed Marie and gave her a cabin and 68 acres of rich land where the industrious Marie grew indigo and tobacco and sold medicines and bearskins. She eventually earned enough to buy land on Isle Brevelle, a sliver of land thirty miles long and a few miles wide between the Cane and Old...
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