I have not written a large amount of historical work but the scripts and plays I have done have been guided by my adherence to known history. Having just watched 300 and seen the ludicrous computer generated battles I smiled, but the speeches were next to awful in as far as they made the Spartans out to be fighting for democratic freedom. As the Athenians went to war with Sparta over the issue of Spartan dictatorship I find that stupid, and as Athens then subjugated Greece to their own form of supremacism I find the whole talk of Greece being the cradle of democracy somewhat flawed. In fact Athenian power is closely aligned to the methodologies used by the British to create and maintain their empire. There is democracy there but you have to dig for it.
I understand films are films but we have to remember how many people take their history lessons from films. How many Americans know that with the end of the Civil War and the opening up of the West some 80% of all cowboys were actually black Americans? How many people actually know that without the Russians America and Britain would have had to fight the Germans for another five years; that the D-Day landings would have failed because of the greater number of Nazis in the field?
We are too brash with our use of history to prove a point. And in so doing we prove only one point – movies can be rubbish.