By Cordelia<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Sleepy Hollow the TV show, in regards to its historical accuracy and historical relevance was, frankly, pretty awful. As Sorlin notes in his essay, \u201cThe historical film: history and memory in media,\u201d \u201cthe most original source [for historians] is the fictional film.\u201d If this be so, and the fictional work of Sleepy Hollow is more authentic than say, a documentary about George Washington, then I give up. Sleepy Hollow finds Ichabod Crane, a soldier on the Rebel side of the American Revolution, dying in 1781 and waking up more than 230 years later in the modern day. What bothered me the most about this premise was the idea that of all the millions of things that have changed in the United States (including, you know, the fact that it’s the United States) Ichabod seems the most fascinated by a car window, a Polygraph test, and Starbucks. Perhaps these three items are symbolic of the materialistic entitlement for which the director or producer believes our generation will be remembered but somehow, I doubt it.<\/p>\n

What was interesting, however, was the idea of communication and transfer of information depicted in the show. Ichabod’s wife was burned at the stake for being a witch, and it is later revealed that she was indeed one. However, even though she has the ability to communicate with her husband through his dreams, the answers to Ichabod’s problems with the Headless Horseman lie in the Bible of George Washington: a piece of writing that was influential during the Revolution and continues to be extremely influential today. For me, this is symbolic of an American tradition of communication through religious texts and worship.<\/p>\n

Sherwood touches on the idea that writers may have to take liberties in adapting history to screens by using language that modern viewers will comprehend and perhaps this transcends in Sleepy Hollow over into more than just verbal communication. Viewers may not find entertainment in Ichabod marveling at a telephone pole or a water fountain, but stick in a joke about slavery or a Seattle coffee company, and you’ve got prime tv. In this sense, maybe Sleepy Hollow tells us less about the culture of the Revolution and more about the culture of today and what mainstream society wishes to remember about the Revolution. In this case, I agree with Sorlin that sometimes, fictional, rather than strictly informational media may be superior.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Cordelia Sleepy Hollow the TV show, in regards to its historical accuracy and historical relevance was, frankly, pretty awful. As Sorlin notes in his essay, \u201cThe historical film: history and memory in media,\u201d \u201cthe most original source [for historians] is the fictional film.\u201d If this be so, and the fictional work of Sleepy Hollow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}