The Untold History of the United States (also known as Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States) is a 2012 documentary series directed, produced, and narrated by Oliver Stone.
Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes. The series is a reexamination of some of the underreported and darkest parts of American modern history, using little-known documents and newly uncovered archival material. The series looks beyond official versions of events to the deeper causes and implications and explores how events from the past still have resonant themes for the present day. Stone said, “From the outset I’ve looked at this project as a legacy to my children and a way to understand the times I’ve lived through. I hope it can contribute to a more global insight into our American history.”[7]
The first three episodes of the series premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 6, 2012, with Indiewire describing them as “extremely compelling” and “daring.”[8] The series was personally presented by Stone at the Subversive Festival on May 4, 2013, in Zagreb, Croatia, which next to film screenings also included debates and public lectures by prominent intellectuals such as Slavoj Žižek and Tariq Ali.[9]
Stone described the project as “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. Certainly in documentary form, and perhaps in fiction, feature form.”[10] Production took four years to complete. Stone confessed, “It was supposed to take two years, but it’s way over schedule”.[11] The premiere was finally set for November 12, 2012.[12] Stone spent $1 million of his own money on the film as the budget inflated from $3 million to $5 million.[13]
The series premiered on Showtime in November 2012. The executive producers were Oliver Stone, Tara Tremaine and Rob Wilson. A book by the same name was also published.
The Untold History of the United States was released on Blu-ray on October 15, 2013. All ten episodes of the show are featured on four discs, and the Blu-ray release also includes various bonus content, as well as two prologue episodes. The first prologue episode deals with World War I, the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson. The second prologue episode highlights the pre-World War II era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.[14][15] The series was released on DVD on March 4, 2014.[16] The series is currently available for streaming on Netflix.
The ten-part series is supplemented by a 750-page companion book, The Untold History of the United States, also written by Stone and Kuznick, released on Oct 30, 2012 by Simon & Schuster.[17]
Kuznick objected to the working title “Secret History”, claiming that “the truth is that many of our ‘secrets’ have been hidden on the front page of the New York Times. If people think the secrets will be deep, dark conspiracies, they’ll be disappointed. We’ll be drawing on the best recent scholarship”.[18] It was subsequently retitled The Untold History of the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unt…
Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery?
I saw the collective, institutional side of this process in the ongoing scrutiny of public statues and street names, the markers at the sites of atrocities, and the brass-plated stones embedded in the sidewalk outside my apartment building that listed all the Holocaust victims who’d once lived there. I saw the individual side of it in the lives of my German friends who’d spent a gap year volunteering at hospitals in Israel, who studied Yiddish in a spirit of preserving the endangered language of a culture their great-grandparents sought to annihilate, or whose relatives read their Stasi files and confronted the neighbors who’d informed on them to the East German police.
.. The longer I lived in Germany, the more steeped I became in this attitude toward the past, and the stranger the scarcity of visible markers of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans seemed on my visits back to the U.S. I understood that the two countries’ histories have different timeframes, different geographies, different varieties of wrongdoing, but some of the broader lessons of Aufarbeitung — that individuals and societies can improve themselves morally by struggling against the human urge to look away from the sins of the past, or that atonement is a process that instills a sense of responsibility for the past rather than an action that starts from that sense — felt strikingly absent in America.
Names in the Ivy League
In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create.
.. In suggesting that “the name of the University itself” was up for grabs, Holloway was referring to the fact that Eli Yale, the university’s founder, was an official of the East India Company and a slave trader.
.. The notion that Calhoun College could remain Calhoun College, and that its name could become, in some sense, an ironic form of critique, suggests just how different universities are from other places.
.. In fact, because Calhoun’s name is protected by South Carolina’s Heritge Act, changing the name of the street is more or less impossible.)
.. The vast Gothic campuses of Princeton and Yale communicate a different idea. Their towers and arches embody a sense of timelessness and power that is profoundly linked to the history of white Europe.