war film-a genre nearly as as the business itself. Just what is it about seeing images of soldiers and other combatants on the big screen (or, for that matter, on the small screen) that continually seems to fascinate the moviegoing (and television-watching) public? From the earliest days with films like D.W. Griffith's Civil epic Birth of a Nation (1915), Hollywood has been attracting audiences by telling war stories and recreating famous battles, a process that still continues as films like Saving Private Ryan (1998), We Were Soldiers (2002), and Jarhead (2005) score big at the box office. Television, too, has tapped into this lucrative market, as evidenced by the success of HBO's Band of Brothers (2001) and the countless hours of footage the major news outlets have shown of conflicts ranging from Vietnam (the first war) to events occurring today in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Film and television are both intimately connected to war and history, and in response to this fact we here at Film & History have dedicated much of our recent time, energy, and this year's issues to examining the ways in which the varied aspects of war come into play in film, television, and history. In particular, we have recently put together a Proceedings CD-ROM for the 2004 Film & History League Conference which was on, appropriately enough, War in Television, and History. Much of the stellar hard work by the participants of that conference is now paying off. In addition to the Proceedings CD and this year's two special issues, we are also putting together an anthology of work on war and film, and we will be including even more work on the topic in our next Film & History CD-ROM Annual. All of this work, of course, is marching us towards our next conference, The Documentary Tradition, which once again will be held in Dallas, Texas at the Dolce International Conference Center. In keeping with our war theme, the two special issues of Film & History for 2006 have been organized as our own March of Time (pun intended). Given that so many different historical periods and conflicts have been recreated on film, the articles in this volume attempt to cover as wide a variety of war topics as possible, all of which are arranged chronologically by the conflicts covered. This first issue, in particular, takes a look at six different intersections of war and film, running the gamut from a discussion of the weaponry of medieval warfare, to the battle of the Alamo, to events of the American Civil War, to the First World War, then to the interwar period of the late 1930s, and finally examining the events and films leading up to America's entry into the second World War. Each of these six articles takes a critical look at how war and history are made or, rather, remade through the camera lenses of Hollywood. Opening this first issue is Carl James Grindley's and the Man: Curious Inaccuracy of Medieval Arms and Armor in Contemporary Film, an intriguing examination of the ways in which several films have depicted the implements of war of medieval Europe. Beginning his article with a discussion of the recent independent hit Garden State (2004), Grindley notes how, ironically, it is seemingly more often those films that are not trying to consciously recreate the medieval period that are the most accurate at doing so, at least in terms of armor and weaponry. Films that attempt to create a plausible medieval setting as part of their mise-en-scene like Excalibur (1981), A Knight's Tale (2001), and Timeline (2003) amongst others, however, often fail at this same task. Grindley suggests that such inaccuracies more often stem from a medieval film's greater need to generate symbolic meaning rather than realism through the costuming and props that recreate the era when kings and knights ruled over Europe. Following Grindley's article, we then jump ahead several centuries and across the Atlantic Ocean into the myths of the fighting men of the old west as discussed in Frank Thompson's Reprinting the Legend: Alamo on Film. …