Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

Probably the one universal thing which connects all American history classes together is the movie Glory. Just about every high school shows it once a year during the Civil War unit, treating it as the gold standard for portraying the Civil War. And I agree! I was a big fan of this movie well before doing this program and it made sense that Brian’s 10th grade classes would see this flick as part of his curriculum. There are a couple reasons why I adopted it for mine. I think I stand out a bit from many other history teachers in being both a cinephile and a history buff, so for me it comes very naturally to try to combine those two into an educational experience. I value movies because I think they display imagery and convey emotions that are hard to replicate in most other formats. They are a way to immerse the viewers into a completely different world. Glory to me is excellent because it captures a lot of what the Civil War was about, why people were fighting, what they were fighting for, the optimists, the cynics and everyone in between. It excellently distills this massive conflict into a 3 hour or so movie and helps the viewer visualize the conflict excellently. This is why I decided to incorporate Glory into my curriculum, not to follow the grain but because of genuine merits I think there are in using movies to display time periods that are otherwise difficult to really grasp.