Abstract
American history and politics have been staple elements of movies since the emergence of the U.S. film industry in the early twentieth century. Cinematic interpretation of presidents, real and imagined, has been central to celluloid exploration of the nation’s past and present. At one level, the focus on the president conforms to the conventions of movie drama that one good man (and in some recent instances, woman) can make a difference. More significantly, moviemakers have depicted presidents as symbols of the nation’s spirit, values, and historical destiny.
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Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).
Michael Coyne, Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
Harry Keyishian, Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies, 1931–2001 (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003).
Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 14–40.
James Pfiffner, ed., The Managerial Presidency, 2nd ed. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999).
Stephen Hess with James Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 3d ed. (Washington DC: Brookings, 2002).
Edward S. Corwin, The Presidency: Office and Powers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley, 1960).
Edward Corwin, The Presidency: Office and Powers (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 29–30.
Michael Genovese, The Power of the American Presidency 1789–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Forrest McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
Marcus Cunliffe, American Presidents and the Presidency (London: Fontana, 1972).
Meena Bose and Mark Landis, eds., The Uses and Abuses of Presidential Ratings (New York: Nova Science, 2003).
Alvin Felzenberg, Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected against All Odds (New York: Random House, 1997), 307–308.
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997), 20–21.
Quoted in Thomas E. Cronin, The State of the Presidency, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 1.
Peggy Noonan, “Ronald Reagan,” in Robert A. Wilson, ed., Character Above All (New York: Simon, 1995), 202.
James Pfiffner, The Character Factor: How We Judge America’s Presidents (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004).
Fred Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 2000). See too “Taking the Temperature,” October 16, 2008, http://www.time.org.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency (New York: Norton, 2005).
James Pfiffner, Power Play: The Bush Administration and the Constitution (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
Michael Genovese and Lori Cox Han, The Presidency and the Challenge of Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944).
Jon Roper, The American Presidents: Heroic Leadership from Kennedy to Clinton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
Jon Roper, “The Contemporary Presidency: George W. Bush and the Myth of Heroic Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (March 2004): 132–42.
For discussion, see Iwan Morgan, Beyond the Liberal Consensus: A Political History of the United States since 1965 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994).
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008).
For fuller discussion, see Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
For good discussion of British history in film, see Claire Monk and Amy Sergeant, eds., British History Cinema: The History, Heritage, and Costume Film (London: Routledge, 2002). For readers seeking to learn more about British cinema in general, useful websites include: “The British Cinema History Project” (University of East Anglia) at http://www.uea.ac.uk/ftv/bchip; and “British Cinema Greats” at http://www.british-cinemagreats.com/.
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© 2011 Iwan W. Morgan
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Morgan, I.W. (2011). Introduction. In: Morgan, I.W. (eds) Presidents in the Movies. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_1
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