ABSTRACT
Media presentations can provide valuable glimpses into the past. Writing about Paris, Michel Reilhac observes, "It's really, truly moving for a Parisian to see, sometimes just in the background of older feature films, how many cars there were, how people dressed, how they walked and behaved .... Since we have films dating back 100 years, it really is this idea of trying to keep contact with the past." 1 Nations pass on their historic legacy through their media presentations. To illustrate, in the documentary film The Unknown War of the East, filmmaker Dimitri Liakhovitski introduced American audiences to a little-known piece of history, when President Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. soldiers to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1918-1919. As James W. Loewen observes, this obscure historical event had an enormous impact on subsequent relations between the United States and the Soviet Union:
Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our "unknown war with Russia." ... Not one of the twelve American history textbooks in my sample even mentions it. [But] this aggression fueled the suspicions ... that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance ... [This] motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages from the invasion.2
