Saturday, March 2, 2013

The Battle of Athens (1946)

I did not realize that a TV-movie had been made about this.  Below is a video that uses some excerpts from the film:


On a national scale, this will not be so easy.

4 comments:

  1. Clayton, I think the link is missing?

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  2. The link works fine. I just watched the 13+ minute video.

    The TV movie is called "An American Story" (1992). It's available on DVD. Several libraries in the cities in Ada County have copies.

    There's quite a few online articles and stories about this event. The American Heritage one is good. The one on Esquire is written by a card carrying lib so not unsurprisingly is very negative about the event.


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  3. Is this about the Greek Civil War?

    Or does it have something to with your video project about the abolitionists in Ohio?

    I ask because due to an old PC, I can't watch video. (In fact I have to block all links to YouTube, because any YouTube link on a Web page sucks 10%-20% of CPU just displaying the link. If the page has five links, my system freezes up and I have to kill the browser.)

    There is nothing on IMDB... Ah. Google sez Athens, Tennessee. Wiki has an article.

    It's not really a gun rights story - the rebel veterans used arms seized from a National Guard arsenal, not their own weapons. (Well, both, but the heavy stuff was from the arsenal.)

    Also they used dynamite, and I don't think anyone sane claims the Second Amendment provides a right to high explosives.

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  4. Well I got a copy from Boise Public Library and just watched the movie.

    All in all a pretty good movie. A few nit-picks perhaps but mostly minor. It's a Hallmark Channel movie from the early 1990's.

    The movie as is typical with a dramatization of a real story takes liberties with the actual story. The movie is set in Texas for one.

    The movie is 90 minutes so is pretty fast paced. It goes into the back stories of the character but has to do it pretty quickly given it is less than two hours.

    The idea that citizens would take up arms to defeat a corrupt local city government is interesting for sure! I'm more taken by the idea of ballot box tampering which is a legitimate concern for today. Or electronic tampering of voting systems...

    The story of what really happened is interesting especially the news media coverage of the event which can be found online. The Veteran's party didn't last long.

    The whole premise of the movie is that veterans fought for freedom overseas and then came home and found they had to fight for it here as well is sure relevant today.

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