Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s [Book Review]

As author Melvyn Stokes notes in his preface, the field of history and film has become crowded lately, with most of the works falling into one of two genres: the theoretically driven single-author work on a small number of films meant to highlight particular historical or filmic issues or problems (such as my History on Film/Film on History (2006)), and the often rather diffuse collection of disconnected essays by multiple authors utilizing different methodologies (such as my edited volume A Blackwell Companion to Historical Film (2013)). Stokes's claim is that his own book is different from both types in that it is single-author work which "focuses on a range of major subjects and themes in American history, arranged in a broadly chronological way".