History Film / TheBirthOfANation

** LoveBeforeFirstSight on Ben Cameron's part for Elsie Stoneman, though. Like a proto-[[Franchise/{{Terminator}} Kyle Reese]], he acquires a picture of her from her brother Phil and throughout his military career, he holds on to it and looks at it on a regular basis before he finally meets her.

* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Abraham Lincoln who wants a peaceful reunification, the one thing in the film that is more or less accurate.

* MyEyesAreDownHere: Some of the KKK robes have a pair of large circles with crosses in them at chest height.

* ValuesDissonance: this movie was extreme even for its time.

->''"Classic or not, ''Birth of a Nation'' has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can't be ignored ... and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word.''"
->-- '''Andrew Sarris'''

->''"Despite Birth's blatant glorification of the KKK and depiction of black Americans as wild animals, this movie still ... nope, we're not finishing that sentence. On one hand, it pioneered concepts like actually moving the cameras and using rapid cuts, and you're probably still seeing its influence in movies today. On the other hand, ''everything else about it.''''"
->--'''Website/{{Cracked}}''', [[http://www.cracked.com/article_19826_6-iconic-scenes-ripped-off-from-lesser-known-movies_p2.html 6 Iconic Scenes Ripped Off From Lesser Known Movies]]

A 1915 silent movie directed by Creator/DWGriffith, starring famous silent film actress Creator/LillianGish, and one of Hollywood's first great "epic" films. Based on the 1905 novel ''The Clansman'' by Thomas Dixon.

The plot of '''''The Birth of a Nation''''' is a two-part chronicle of American history. The first part depicts the nation before, during, and after UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar, from the perspective of two juxtaposed families - the Northern Stonemans, who are abolitionists and federalists, and the Southern Camerons, who are secessionists. When war breaks out, the houses must send their sons off to their respective opposing armies. The Camerons suffer many hardships in the war torn and depleted South, and must deal with hunger, ransackers, looters, and rapists. Eventually, the Union army crushes the Confederacy, ending the war. President Abraham Lincoln promises to rebuild the South, in spite of protests from vengeful Northern politicians who would execute its leaders and treat the land as conquered territory. But Abraham Lincoln is assassinated at Ford's Theater, allowing the Radical Republicans, led by Austin Stoneman, to gain strength and support for inflicting punitive measures on the South for their rebellion.

* AdaptionalHeroism:

* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The film's opening doesn't observe that the North was about to let the South go, until the South fired on Fort Sumter; nor does it mention the South selling Northern black prisoners into slavery during the war, or granting no quarter against Northern black troops; and, of course, it presents the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes.

* AllIsWellThatEndsWell: Though whether it ends well or not depends a lot on your perspective.

* HappinessInSlavery: The real reason why [[BelievingTheirOwnLies Griffith kept insisting his film wasn't racist]] was that he had, [[MindScrew what he called]], positive African-American characters who remained loyal to their families after abolition and during Reconstruction. These include the many Mammy characters, the house servants who are faithful to the families they served before the War and the many African-Americans who state they don't want the right to vote and argue against freedmen who serve in the Union Army and the Freedman's Bureau.
* HistoricalBadassUpgrade: The Klan were not as badass as shown in the film:
** One of the intertitles mentions that the Klan murdered as many people as died in Gettysburg (the single bloodiest battle in American history numbering 46,000 on both sides). In actual fact, the Klan killed nearly 3000 people which is still a lot for a vigilante proto-terrorist outfit. They specialized in back-alley guerilla tactics and assassinations rather than full charges.
** The climactic charge of the Klan against the Union army is a total inversion of reality. The first Klan was shut down when President UsefulNotes/UlyssesSGrant sent in more soldiers to shut them down and enforce reconstruction. The reversal of Reconstruction only began in 1876 upon the election of Grant's successor who removed the Union soldiers in the South and left no protection to the African-American citizens. The Klan was dead by this time.
* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The Ku Klux Klan and the unreconstructed Southern aristocracy are presented as victims of the conquering North rather than treacherous rebels who started the war to defend slavery. Needless to say the film's opening section depicting the Civil War makes no mention of the little matter of "firing on Fort Sumter" or the many war crimes committed by the Confederacy ("No quarter" to African-American servicemen, selling freedman soldiers and Northern blacks back into slavery) during the Civil War.
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Needless to say, Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith were not the mustache-twirling villains their {{Expy}} are portrayed as. And Thaddeus Stevens was definitely not a corrupt hypocrite as Stoneman ends up becoming. The carpetbaggers and scalawags were not LesCollaborateurs intending to make the South into an Empire either.

* LesCollaborateurs: As part of the Lost Cause myth, carpetbaggers, scalawags and freedmen are presented as this in the eyes of the defeated South.
* LightIsNotGood: Inverted; the KKK are the heroes in the film's climax, though they still come across to modern viewers as pretty rotten.

* WrittenByTheWinners: Inverted; the film was written from the perspective of the ''losing side'' in the Civil War, i.e Southern whites, and it certainly wasn't the most objective view of the Reconstruction Period. Of course, from the perspective of African-American freedmen and former slaves, this trope very much applies since they were the real losers of Reconstruction. In this film, African-American servicemen in the Union Army and officers in the freedman's bureau are painted as bad guys, while the African-Americans who remain loyal to the Old South are shown positively.

* LesCollaborateurs: As part of the Lost Cause myth, carpetbaggers, scalawag and freedmen are presented as this in the eyes of the defeated South.

* HollywoodNight: Via use of tints (standard for silent films before colour).

* NonRoyalPrincess: Elsie and the Cameron sisters, at least at first.

* EpicMovie: Probably [[UrExample the first ever]].

* FictionalCounterpart: Austin Stoneman is a stand-in for Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican leader.

* GenreBusting

** The climactic charge of the Klan against the Union army is a total inversion of reality. The first Klan was shut down when President UsefulNotes/UlyssesSGrant sent in more soldiers to shut them down and enforce reconstruction. The reversal of Reconstruction only began in 1876 upon the election of Grant's successor who removed the Union soldiers in the South and left no protection to the African-American citizens.

* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The Ku Klux Klan, and how.
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Needless to say, Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith were not the mustache-twirling villains they're portrayed as.
* HollywoodNight

* NeverMessWithGranny: In ''The Birth of a Nation'', we have an overweight elderly housekeeper leap into action and save her employer, knocking down at least one ruffian and two soldiers in the process. Interesting for a white supremacist racist work, the heroine is black and the man she's saving is white.
** It was a [[ValuesDissonance common belief at the time, at least among Southern whites]], that African-Americans had been [[HappinessInSlavery better off, and happier, as slaves]], until they were "stirred up" by Northern interlopers. A white supremacist racist work might easily see propagating that trope via a scene where a black woman leaps to the defense of her beloved employer/master as more important than portraying an individual white man's superiority over an individual black woman.

* WrittenByTheWinners: Inverted; the film was written from the perspective of the ''losing side'' in the Civil War, and it certainly wasn't the most objective view of the Reconstruction Period.
* YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters: The UsfulNotes/KuKluxKlan

This film is in the public domain and can be viewed in its entirety on [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=302YMeiDSrI YouTube]] or even [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation its article]] on [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]].

Being one of the first feature films ever, ''The Birth of a Nation'' introduced, refined, and popularized zillions of tropes, and is considered one of the most groundbreaking films ever. But it is also extremely controversial - its view of Reconstruction is one that promotes white supremacy and that glorifies the KKK. In fact, the KKK had a ''huge'' revival in the years after this was released (it numbered around '''6 million members''' at its peak around 1925), and many people credit this movie as one of the reasons why.

* YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters: The Ku Klux Klan.