Black Hawk Down Research Articles

Courage under fire: Re-evaluating Black Hawk Down and the Battle of Mogadishu

The current understanding of Black Hawk Down is based on two assumptions: allegations of tired tactics and claims by Somali National Alliance leader Mohammed Farrah Aideed. These assumptions, accepted without much analysis or supporting evidence, stem from analysing Black Hawk Down working backwards from after the event, with a predeterminant methodology. This article examines the causation objectively, showing these assumptions as evidentiary weak, and instead highlights the actions of another American unit, Team Courage, as a potential factor in the events of 3 October, universally overlooked thus far, prompting a reinterpretation of the existing narrative, the SNA as an enemy, and the veracity of Aideed’s claims.

The Woman's Picture in the Trade Press of Classical Hollywood

Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield, 2003. 203 pages, $75.00. A Huge Subject Bizarre as it may seem, there is not that much difference between a creaky silent film like Birth of a Nation (1915) and a state of the art wonder like Black Hawk Down (2001). Both deal, in essence, with brave, upstanding, loyal white chaps fighting a savage and chaotic horde of people of African descent, and it is abundantly clear which group is the superior. The reason for this continuity is not just the baleful consistency of racism. Rather, it is the need for white maleness to define and assert itself against the idea of the proverbial other. Nonwhites in films exist only to prop up the unstable identity of the dominant American group, to act as a mirror reflecting back the supremacy of whiteness. This is, in a nutshell, the argument of Hernan Vera's and Andrew M. Gordon's provocative book. Each chapter takes a different aspect of what they term the sincere fictions of Caucasian superiority and shows how it operates in various films. Apart from old friends like Griffith's epic and Gone with the Wind, both of which are central to their idea of the divided white self, the authors examine the film convention whereby non-white races always need to be led to freedom and fulfillment by a Persil-bright messiah (Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom); they analyze the role of Tahitians in the drama of male authority that exists in different ways in the three versions of Mutiny on the Bounty; they follow the evolution of what might be called the Scarlett and Mammy complex in women's relationships in Imitation of Life (Stahl's and Sirk's) and in more recent productions like Passion Fish. There is plenty more besides. The general message is that, although the archetypes (or stereotypes) may vary according to different historical conditions and cultural pressures, certain concepts remain depressingly constant. Blackness and otherness is passive or savage, comic or servile; the lesser breeds, as Kipling would have put it, are capable only of nurturing whites through their neuroses or of being led by WASPish heroes. Even a righton New Age western like Dances With Wolves turns out to be a story of a white male crisis in which the Native Americans are subsidiary elements in Kevin Costner's psychodrama. It is, in short, a huge subject, but Vera and Gordon (they sound like a bad nightclub act) have not written a huge book. As a result, they suffer from trying to pack too much into the space. Matters are not helped by their use of examples from almost every conceivable non-white image, from African and Native Americans to Vietnamese in The Green Beret, and even the aliens in Men In Black. Because each of these groups raises slightly different contextual questions, the book finds itself skimming over problems or eliding issues that should be separate. For instance, there is a difference between white messiahs operating in their own country (To Kill A Mockingbird) and those spreading their beneficence abroad ( The Man Who Would Be King). …

Othering Terrorism: A Rhetorical Strategy of Strategic Labeling

The term terrorism is as value-laden a descriptor as one will encounter in the contemporary period. Though it evokes a strong image of an Orientalist, colonized, brown body enacting brutal, theatrical violence from behind a balaclava, the term itself describes very little. The decision to label a particular act, individual, or movement as terroristic is more a discursive question of politics than means. In the post-9/11 era, state-level rhetoricians describe their ideological enemies that can be “othered” as terrorists, while some are considered extremists. In doing so, Muslim, Arab, Asian, African, and foreign-born advocates and practitioners of political violence are termed terrorists with near universality, while white, Christian, Westerners acting in the name of white supremacy, anti-abortion, and so-called patriot, or sovereign citizen movements are left largely outside of that taxonomy. Through an analysis of the film Black Hawk Down, jihadist-produced media designed for US audiences, media accounts of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the framing of rightist violence, it is clear how violence is viewed positionally. Furthermore, these examples demonstrate how terrorism has been utilized as a defamatory label applied asymmetrically to some proponents of political violence—those brown and black lives existing in precarity who challenge discursive claims on violence, statehood, capital, and what are broadly understood to be Western values.

Black Hawk-Down: Adaptation and the Military-Entertainment Complex

This article investigates the non-fiction book Black Hawk Down (1999) by Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down the movie (2001) directed by Ridley Scott, and the computer game Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (2003). The article suggests that while the movie and the game must be studied as adaptations of the first text, the tools developed by adaptation studies, and that are typically used to study the transfer of narratives from one media form to another, do not suffice to fully describe the ways in which these narratives change between iterations. To provide a more complete account of these adaptations, the article therefore also considers the shifting political climate of the 9/11 era, the expectations from different audiences and industries, and, in particular, the role that what James Der Derian has termed the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-Net) plays in the production of narrative. The article thus investigates how a specific political climate and MIME-Net help to produce certain adaptations. Based on this investigation, the article argues that MIME-Net plays a very important role in the adaptation of the Black Hawk Down story by directing attention away from historical specificity and nuance, towards the spectacle of war. Thus, in Black Hawk Down the movie and in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, authenticity is understood as residing in the spectacular rendering of carnage rather than in historical facts. The article concludes that scholarly investigations of the adaptation of military narratives should combine traditional adaptation studies tools with theory and method that highlight the role that politics and complexes such as MIME-Net play within the culture industry.

From the Sands of the Ogaden to Black Hawk Down: The End of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa

From the Ogaden War to the Black Hawk Down incident, the Horn of Africa was a theatre of events with far-reaching international consequences. This paper argues that the distinctive process leading to the end of the bipolar conflict in the Horn is crucial to understanding the role of this region both during and after the Cold War. Through an extensive analysis of the period 1985–1991, this article explains why only a few years after the ‘burial’ of SALT II in the sands of the Ogaden, the superpowers withdrew from the region which had been the symbol of the failure of détente. Similarly, an analysis of the end of the Cold War is paramount to understanding why, after the break-up of the USSR, the Horn of Africa hosted one of the most tragic episodes of post-Cold War US foreign policy.

Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the “Platoon Movie,” and the War of Choice in Iraq

While preparing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Bush invited his advisors to screenings of Black Hawk Down (2002). “Bush . . . told his aides that America’s hasty exit from Somalia after 18 soldiers died in the 1993 raid made famous in the movie . . . emboldened America’s terrorist enemies” to attack us on September 11. This study explains the ideological force of Black Hawk Down by framing it as the culmination of developments in American national mythology, and the mass culture genres that carry it. The “Platoon Movie” developed during WW II propagated a new myth of multi-ethnic American nationality, and a “war imaginary” which figures WW II as the “Good War.” That myth was discredited by defeat in Vietnam; but starting in 1980, American war films, and war-themed science fiction films, seconded the work of neo-conservative policy makers to recuperate the “war imaginary.” This entailed a sharpening of racialist interpretations of international conflict, and tension between the multicultural symbolism of the “platoon” and the idealization of Whites as “real Americans.”

Revisiting the Linkage: PDD 25, Genocide in Rwanda and the US Peacekeeping Experience of the 1990s

ABSTRACTAfter the successful US–UN action in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, by the mid-1990s Washington's enthusiasm for multilateral action had already faded away. This was evident after the ‘Black Hawk Down’ disaster of the US Mission in Somalia in October 1993 and the release of a much more restrictive peacekeeping policy in May 1994 (PDD-25). The US inaction during the following Rwandan genocide in spring 1994 was then seen as the obvious consequence of the American ‘trauma’ in Somalia, as well as the symbol of Washington's withdrawal from peacekeeping commitments. However, in the light of new archival documents a different scenario emerges. This article shows that the consequential link, often stressed by the literature, between the Somali disaster, the release of PDD-25 and American inaction in Rwanda is much less straightforward. This suggests that the policy in Rwanda was not just a consequence of the Somali debacle and that the reasons for US inaction toward the genocide must be gauged within a broader set of factors. The study of Washington's policy in Rwanda thus becomes a significant case to investigate some broader patterns of post-Cold War American foreign policy and to re-evaluate the US peacekeeping experience of the 1990s.

The Successes and Failures of the Battle of Mogadishu and Its Effects on U.S. Foreign Policy

The Battle of Mogadishu, more commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down,” was one of the most controversial conflicts in the second half of the twentieth century. It left a lingering question in people’s minds: was it a success or a failure? While certainly there were many failures and casualties throughout the mission, based on a military definition, it was a clear cut success; Task Force Ranger (TFR) accomplished the objective of the mission, despite significant losses, by retrieving the two targets assigned them. Both the failures and successes of the mission, as well as the overarching Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, however, have impacted U.S. foreign policy and strategies for three presidential administrations. The question is not whether the events throughout the battle impacted foreign policy and strategy. Rather, the question is how significantly they were affected. Arguably one of the largest American special operations missions in recent history, the events of the battle have been thoroughly examined by the United States government and military in order to effect change in both realms. Examples found in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur point to a refusal by the United States to commit ground troops in an unstable situation, providing air support at a maximum. Following the foreign policy failure within Somalia in the early 1990s, except for the situation in Iraq/Afghanistan, the United States has refused to act as the global police force it was so well known to be in the 20th century. This paper will attempt to prove that both the successes and failures of Operation Restore Hope and Operation Gothic Serpent directly caused this change in foreign policy.

Hollywood’s Africa after 1994

In this book, Mary Ellen Higgins, who has numerous previously published essays on the literary and cinematic representations of human rights, has brought together fifteen intriguing essays by a multidisciplinary community of contributors to examine Hollywood’s representations of Africa. Their historical starting point—1994, the year of the genocide in Rwanda—stems from how that event captured the attention of human rights activists and Hollywood celebrities to yield a symbiosis of sorts in which Hollywood made human rights films and activists saw film as a means to motivate viewer campaigns against human rights violation. These recent films have human rights issues as their “major thrust” but oftenmix the issues withHollywood’s bequeathed legacy of “colonial” tropes that cast Africa as dangerous, exotic, and savage, and render the people and places of the continent as amere backdrop forWestern protagonists and perspectives. The films discussed range in the book from big-budget studio productions to independent and transnational outputs that engage with Hollywood’s legacies. The films are Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Edward Hick’s Blood Diamond, Kevin Macdonald’s Last King of Scotland, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came onHorseback, Phillip Noyce and TomHooper’s Red Dust andCatch a Fire, Darell Roodt’s Dangerous Ground and Cry the Beloved Country, Neil Blompkamp’s District 9, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Anton Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands With the Devil, Fernando Meirellis’s The Constant Gardener, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Newton Aduaka’s Ezra, and Mahmet Selah-Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa. The book’s driving question is: How can Hollywood’s Africa be characterized after 1994 and how has this been challenged, changed, and/or updated? In other BOOK REVIEW

Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory by David Kieran (review)

FOREVER VIETNAM: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory. By David Kieran. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2014.Forever Vietnam is a work of memory studies, a meta-analysis that traces how the legacy of the Vietnam War shaped American remembrances of the Alamo; World War II and the belated acknowledgement of post-traumatic syndrome (PTSD); the infamous Andersonville prison camp of the Civil War; the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia; Flight 93; and the War on Terror. In all of these case studies, author David Kieran demonstrates how the experience of the Vietnam War provided an interpretive construct. This book was written call attention the use/misuse of Vietnam War history in order to delineate more fully the contours of many Americans' enduring embrace of militarism, often uncritical acquiescence the use of military force abroad, and continued failure acknowledge the crises that those interventions prompted in the lives of veterans, their families, and the civilians who experience them (13).In certain respects, Kieran is following the trail that was blazed by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, where it was shown how myths of the American frontier continued shape American sensibilities, including how the Vietnam War was fought and perceived. Now the latter is material for myths in its own right. The research material for this volume includes newspaper articles, documents from archives, government publi cations, and primary and secondary works, including war memoirs. The work includes endnotes and an index as well as illustrations. Forever Vietnam is a fascinating study in that it unveils the shifting and often odd lessons that Americans have made about the war, but none of this is surprising since the war, televised and shown in everyone's living room, was long, bloody, and expensive, ending tragically with the Fall of Saigon.One of the problems with any such study is distinguishing the representative from the idiosyncratic. American society, as the poet Walt Whitman long ago noted, is large and teeming with multitudes and is thereby discordant. Not all voices speak for the general public, however. A politician's remark, an old Vietnam veteran's gesture (such as leaving a Purple Heart medal at the Flight 93 Memorial), a veteran group's pseudo-event (to gain media attention in order generate more interest in bolstering veterans' benefits), or any author's retelling of a war may or may not symbolize something larger or significant. …

Everything but ‘ordinary’: Representations of Africa in film

Abstract This article examines four war-themed mainstream films about Africa – I Dreamed of Africa (Hugh Hudson, 2000), The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001) and Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006). The films were chosen because they present seemingly different representations of the African characters through their narrative strategies. The discussion will examine the representation of Western and African characters and how they function and interact with each other within a particular narrative context. The films remain centred on events that have occurred in Africa yet display typical features and characteristics of Hollywood film: the central characters are predominantly colonizers from the West who have entered Africa and interact from a hierarchical point of view with the land, the animals and the people. Drawing on Ndebele’s discussion on whether states in Africa can ever be represented as ‘ordinary’, this article will interrogate how the representation of both characters from Africa and the African setting contribute to the perceived notion that Africa can never be ‘ordinary’ and it will always be represented in extreme terms.

Violence, Cynicism and the Cinematic Spectacle of (Mis)Representing African Child Soldiers in Black Hawk Down and Blood Diamond

SummaryThe aim of this article is to explain why and with what ideological effect Western film directors depict the African child soldier as victim, reluctant recruit and unwilling participant in Africa's violent wars in Black Hawk Down (Scott 2001) and Blood Diamond (Zwick 2007). Using Agamben's ideas of the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) and the “paradox of sovereignty” (Agamben 1998), this article engages symbolical processes by which the formal rhetorical devices of the technology of audiovisual film texts “remediate an account vested in the perspective of only one party” (Potzsch 2011: 80-81). It will be demonstrated that within the narrative topoi of the films Black Hawk Down (Scott 2001) and Blood Diamond (Zwick 2007), African child soldiers are symbolically constituted as enemy, the other, and as existing on the margin of “bare life” (Agamben 1998: 4) and whose value is not worth mourning for – simply, “ungrievable” (Butler 2010). However, this article argues differently and stresses that violence is not sui generis to Africa and to the African child soldier.

Violence and Genocide in African Literature and Film

Studies on violence and genocide in Africa have for many years relied on the disciplines of history, sociology, and individual testimonies to make sense of the crimes against humanity. The main justification for using anthropological and sociological accounts to explain violence and genocide in Africa has been encouraged by an empiricist research culture that relied on quantitative methods to measure the impact of violence and genocide in Africa. The main aim in these sorts of research had been to over-awe the world with the image of Africa as the heart of darkness. These approaches are forcefully recreated in the worked by critics like Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal (1999) for whom it is disorder that makes Africa work. Furthermore the reliance on the evidence provided in statistics gathered from the victims who of violence and genocide unfortunately was manipulated by some critics to create the wrong perception which that only the people in Africa affected directly by violence and genocide could write insightfully and authoritatively on the subject. These views have now been challenged in a new scholarship by young African intellectuals. These African intellectuals as are represented in this issue argue in different ways that the structural, systemic and symbolical forms of violence introduced by colonialism, found a new and was and then intensified by some postcolonial leaders whose politics undermined the potential of Africa to grow out of the stereotype constituted in the view that the continent is a place where anything and everything negative that can happen in the world is manifested. The power of the voices of victims of genocide has also provided compelling evidence of, and provided a robust moral argument to convince the world to act whenever the spectre of genocidal wars rears its head. But the actions of the world's powerful governments have been selective. Where their interests lay, they would act or not act depending on the global coalition forces' immediate interests. There is however in Africa, a refreshing look by young African intellectuals that refuse to minimize the complicity of Africans in their own historical misfortunes. This issue Violence and Genocide in African Literature and film tackles the above described themes of violence, genocide, and African complicity. The authors represented in this issue are drawn from different parts of Africa and the divergent nature of their views on the roots and routes of violence and genocide provide stimulating reading. For example, the authors in the issue sometimes distinguish and on other times deliberately collapse the conceptual boundaries between violence, civil war and genocide in ways that seek to provoke readers to further interrogate the forces that shape and frame the discourses on violence and genocide in Africa. Nyasha Mboti's Violence in Postcolonial African Film explores the site of Sissako's film, Bamako to argue that violence is often invisible to the naked eye, and is easily missed if one is looking for the stereotypes of violence such as rape, killings and beatings. The article further argues that the way we read representations of violence needs to be constantly subjected to rigorous contextualising and historicising, and that analytical frameworks should allow for more questions as opposed to certainties. Maurice Vambe uses Agamben's ideas of the state of exception (2008), and the paradox of sovereignty to demonstrate that within the narrative topoi of the films, Black Hawk Down and Blood Diamonds, produced and directed by white people from the west, the African child-soldiers are symbolically constituted as enemy, the other, and one existing on the margin of bare life (Agamben 1998) and whose value is not worth mourning for--simply, ungrievable (Butler 2010). …

Which comes first? Unpacking the relationship between peace agreements and peacekeeping missions

Why do combatants engaged in civil conflict sign peace agreements when they do? Does a commitment by the United Nations (UN) to send a peacekeeping mission increase the probability that combatants will sign an agreement? With regards to the relationship between peace agreements and UN peacekeeping missions, previous studies of civil war have taken one of two positions: (a) a peace agreement between combatants causes an increase in the probability that the UN will send a peacekeeping mission to the conflict; or (b) the UN’s decision to send a peacekeeping mission to a conflict causes an increase in the probability that combatants will sign a peace agreement. I contend that the UN’s decision to send peacekeepers to a conflict and the combatant’s decision to sign a peace agreement occur simultaneously. To overcome the simultaneity, I exploit exogenous variation in the UN’s willingness to send peacekeepers to conflicts in the mid-1990s, based on the experience of the UNOSOM II mission in Somalia, to identity the causal effects that UN peacekeeping has on the likelihood of combatants signing peace agreements. Not accounting for endogeneity, the data suggest that the UN’s willingness to send peacekeepers increases the probability of a peace agreement. A recursive bivariate probit model using Black Hawk Down as an instrumental variable, however, indicates that the UN’s willingness to send peacekeepers to a conflict does not increase the probability that combatants will sign an agreement. This finding suggests that combatants sign agreements for reasons related internally to the conflict, not pressure from the international community.

Analysing characters' interactions in filmic text: a functional semiotic approach

This paper presents an analytical tool for constructing characters' action patterns in film. Understanding characters in moving images has been regarded as one of the most significant elements of narrative comprehension and interpretation because spectators' inferences of narrative structures are substantially mediated by characters. The social semiotic method presented in this paper shows how characters' actions and interactions can be systematically constructed based on the co-patterning of textual elements in film and how the patterns provide an analytical foundation for understanding and interpreting characters. In addition, this paper also reviews the previous explorations of the more fine-grained approaches to character analysis and then demonstrates how the method the paper suggests can support and strengthen the accounts provided to date. Most importantly, by comparing scenes within and across two war films, The Thin Red Line (1998) and Black Hawk Down (2001), the article will show the potential of this method for effectively constraining hypotheses for empirical investigations of filmic meaning.

JUS AD BELLUM AND INTERVENTION IN SOMALIA: WHY A MILITARY RESPONSE CAN STILL WORK

Somalia has suffered a rupture. Following the failed United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) interventions to stabilise the failed state, few state leaders or military organisations consider serious intervention. The research on which this article is based, sought to provide a theoretical foundation for re-intervention into Somalia using “just-war” theory, particularly that of jus ad bellum. By highlighting how intervention is just, feasible and legitimate when employed through the right channels and within the right strategic framework, this article reports on ways in which the hypothetical stabilisation of Somalia can be achieved realistically, should the political will ever emerge. The lessons of UNOSOM are not necessarily valid anymore, and as such the research reported here examined the problem of Somalia on the basis that intervention need not result in another Blackhawk Down.

Borders, Barriers and Grievable Lives

Abstract Based on a close reading of Ridley Scott’s war film Black Hawk Down (USA 2001; BHD), the present article investigates the formal properties through which a certain strain of war and action movies discursively constitutes the other – the enemy – as less than human. I develop the argument that the emergent relation between friend and foe in these films can be read through the concept of the border as an epistemological barrier that keeps the other incomprehensible, inaccessible, and ultimately ungrievable. Having demonstrated how BHD sets up such epistemological barriers, I widen my focus and show that similar formal properties can be found in other audio-visual media, such as video games or news items. I then proceed to investigate how the societal impacts of this audio-visual rhetoric might be conceptualized. Do the mass media constitute a logistics that organizes audiences’ perceptions of war, violence, and the other? Does the barring of the face of the enemy from the public sphere of appearance render particular lives ungrievable and therefore unprotectable? The main theoretical frame of the paper consists of an application of the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to an analysis of audio-visual media, and of the approaches of Judith Butler, James Der Derian, and Paul Virilio to conceptualizing impacts of media representations on political discourse and practice in times of war.

US failures in strategy and the ‘CNN effect’


 
 Reviewed book by Robert G. Patman
 
 
 
 Publication date: October, 2011
 
 
 
 
 In this short, but interesting book, Robert Patman argues that US policy failures in the lead up to and aftermath of the October 1993 ‘Blackhawk Down’ incident in Mogadishu facilitated the conditions for the terrorist attacks on the US mainland in 2001. The thesis that the US merely reaped the bad fruit of its foreign policy on 9/11 is not new, but Patman’s approach is.
 
 

Bystanders and Interventionists: Where and When Do States Intervene to Stop Genocide?

This paper examines the psychology of intervention to stop genocides, using the Kosovo crisis, Rwanda and other historical examples to try to generate a very preliminary framework for understanding where, why and when states intervene to prevent mass killing and genocidal slaughter. From the realist perspective, it is a mystery why states intervene at all to stop genocides, at least where they lack a compelling national interest for doing so. And yet states sometimes do intervene without a self-interested justification. The United States arguably lacks any compelling interest in intervention to forestall a mass slaughter in Libya today, for instance, and yet it has done so. In an initial effort to explain where and when states intervene or stand by, this paper examines the role of a situational force which dissuades states from intervening (the well-known ‘bystander effect’) and a dispositional factor which may pull decision-makers in either direction (the personal experiences of decision-makers and the historical analogies they draw upon). In Rwanda, for instance, President Clinton’s then recent experience of Somalia and the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident persuaded him not to intervene, while compelling analogies with Bosnia and Munich prodded Madeleine Albright and other decision-makers to resolve the Kosovo crisis quickly in 1999. Similarly, the Rwandan analogy seems to have influenced the reasoning of UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Obama officials during the current Libyan crisis, even as analogies with the arming of Afghan revels by the CIA in the 1980s push the administration in the opposite direction.

Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History

WHY WE FOUGHT: AMERICA'S WARS IN FILM AND HISTORY Ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, University Press of Kentucky, 2008, 624 pp. Eschewing psychoanalytic, formalist, and auteur critical approaches in favor of one that privileges simultaneously the internal and the external contexts of cinematic narratives, Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor have long insisted that films must be read for both their historical and their aesthetic elements. Their recent co-edited collection, Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, offers a number of essays exemplifying their unique interdisciplinary approach. Its twenty-three selections, most of which were initially presented at the Film and History Conference in 2005, examine a widely disparate though representative selection of important films from the American war genre through a self-avowed film and history lens that views movie, newsreel, and television productions as historical documents that are as deserving of close, scholarly, and contextual analysis as other primary and secondary historical resources. Inspired by the prevailing tenets of scholarship and social and cultural history, most contributors combine relatively cursory readings of a film's cinematographic and aesthetic elements with more detailed analysis of the historical accuracy of its content and the sociocultural contexts of its production, distribution, and reception. Indeed, whether assessing a as a propaganda vehicle or determining the role of government sponsorship or censorship in pre- and postproduction, the collection as a whole tends to see war films as cultural texts that not only record events but also influence perceptions about the events depicted while simultaneously reflecting the values, morals, and ideals of both the era in which the events purportedly happened and the era in which the was produced and released. Thus, depending on its particular mode of historical inquiry, each essay examines the genre's films within a rubric defined by four frameworks identified in the collection's expansive introduction, assessing each as a representation of history, as a document of social or cultural history, as a representation of a particular moment in history, or as actual historical fact. Though the editors' introduction and John Shelton Lawrence's excellent filmography and bibliography sections are invaluable in their own right for their precision and concision, the collection's true strength lies in its comprehensive assessment of the genre, from feature films and documentaries to newsreels and television miniseries. Extensive and inclusive with respect to content as well, its essays consider mediated depictions of almost every one of the United States' armed conflicts since the Revolutionary War. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments, written by Frank Thompson, deals with problematic cinematic depictions of the battle of the Alamo; yet another powerful essay assesses the heavily mediated and interpretive mythic condensation (443) at the core of Ridley Scott's powerful adaptation of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (2001). This is not to say, of course, that Rollins and O'Connor ignore the nation's involvement in large-scale warfare. In an effort to ensure both breadth and historical context, the editors have adroitly organized their collection into four parts. Part 1 assesses films dealing with the nation's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars, to include the American Revolution, the MexicanAmerican War, and the Civil War. Part 2 examines cinematic representations of World War I and World War II. Part 3 appraises films dealing with the paradox of limited warfare, to include the Cold War and Vietnam, and Part 4 considers contemporary filmic narratives dealing with the nation's more recent asymmetric conflicts. In addition to O'Connor's and Rollins's lucid contributions, the collection's strongest essays, such as those by Gary Edgerton, Robert Myers, Ian Scott, Robert Brent Toplin, and John Shelton Lawrence and John McGarrahan, clearly and explicitly model the film and history approach. …