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…
George Washington’s Fugitive Slave: Ona
A little-known story of how one woman stood up to one of the most powerful men in American history. Her story comes to us from Uncivil, a history podcast from Gimlet where they go back to the time our divisions turned into a war, and bring you stories left out of the official history.
What is racism?
Its when 250 Lakota massacred at Wounded Knee are not regarded as the country’s largest mass shooting in U.S. History.
-Matt Sherman
What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?
I can supply a few comments to highlight just how little attention is paid in the media, histories, and by most people to find out what actually happened. For example, I was present at the visit and demo, and it was the work of my group and myself that Steve saw, yet the Quora question is the first time that anyone has asked me what happened. (Worth pondering that interesting fact!)
.. First, it’s worth understanding that many people (perhaps even a thousand or more) had seen live demos of the Alto and Smalltalk before Steve. This is because Steve showed up in 1979, and the Alto and Smalltalk had been running for 6 years (starting in the first half of 1973), and we were a relatively open lab for visiting colleagues and other interested people (like Herbie Hancock and Al Gore).
Many more people had read articles that I’d written (e.g. in Scientific American, Sept 1977), and one with Adele Goldberg (in IEEE Computer March 1977).
.. Steve, after praising the GUI to the skies, realizes what he’s saying and immediately says “but it was flawed and incomplete”, etc. This was his way of trying to be “top gun” when in a room where he wasn’t the smartest person.
.. One of Steve’s ways to feel in control was to object to things that were actually OK, and he did this a few times — but in each case Dan and Larry were able to make the changes to meet the objections on the fly because Smalltalk was not only the most advanced programming language of its time, it was also live at every level, and no change required more than 1/4 second to take effect.
.. One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change.
.. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear). Again this was done in a few seconds, and voila!