Hooray for Carol Berkin!

Women's historian Carol Berkin once said that she views every documentary she participates in as a correction to Mel Gibson movies. According to Dr. Berkin, "A movie like The Patriot is filled with the most outrageous historical impossibilities—first, Gibson is a rich Southern planter who grows corn. I mean, he lives in South Carolina, the rice-producing capital of America, and it never dawned on him to grow rice? He grows corn, which he couldn’t sell to anybody if his life depended on it. Secondly, his slaves apparently are not slaves, they’re members of a union and they have pension benefits. It’s just ridiculous. But what is most disturbing about the movie is it puts an actor in an 18th-century costume but lets him retain all his 20th-century sensibilities. Everybody in the movie thinks and behaves like a modern person, and the message that comes across to students is that the 18th century is just like the 20th century except that the people have different hairdos."