Entertainment Blogging Scholarship: Gone with the Wind

In 1939 Gone with the Wind was released in the United States. It would become one of the highest grossing films of all time. It won ten Academy Awards, and has been listed in the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest American Films of All Time. In 1989, it was selected to be preserved by the National Film Registry. At the time, it was the longest film to have been made and one of the first technicolor films ever made. It has become a point-of-reference for American film and American culture.
The film takes place in the south during the American Civil War and is a window into the lives of an aristocratic family living on a plantation. While not quite as stridently polar and racist as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind reflects a view of the pre-Civil War south as a paradisiacal lost world that was ruined by a war of "northern attrition." The roles of lead characters Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler clearly and very determinedly establish first sympathy for the efforts of the south and then resentment for the north. When the film was initially released, this "lost cause" view of the south in the Civil War was prevalent. However, later the film was heavily criticized for its depiction of African-American slaves as docile, subservient people content with their lives and clearly incapable of independent action.
The film is important in its own right, but more importantly the film is a timepiece for how American culture viewed the Civil War in the early 20th century. It is historically important because its not a retro-active expose of the events of a certain time, but a very public declaration of how Americans interpreted that time. This scholarship is sponsored by USDish.com