Gettysburg: The Great Battle That the Movies Ignored

[This story appeared in slightly different form in the Time Home Entertainment book Gettysburg.] History, the saying goes, is written by the victors. Yet in most of the most popular movies about the Civil War, the Confederacy held the rooting interest. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, by far the biggest hit of the silent-film period, saw the Union Army as transgressors on a hallowed land, the Reconstruction Era as an act of obscene punishment, blacks as barbarians turned useful fools by No...