Grant: A Historical Rant about a Historical Mini-Series

I know I’m a little late on this review, but I finally finished History Chanel’s 3 part mini-series about Ulysses S. Grant. Also, think of this sort of like a Yelp review - even though I mostly enjoyed this series, this review is for me to vent about what was missing in my opinion. This my pretentious Karen moment, but every now and again you have to get it out of your system.

First, the good stuff.
1) They tried to downplay alcoholism as an actual issue and disease, not just a character flaw nor the reason for problems with his presidency.

2) Multiple historians were used instead if the same 4 white dudes who they use for all of the WWII stuff.

3) Fisher Stevens, Ron Chernow, and Leonardo DiCaprio were amongst the producers. I just think that’s cool.

4) It depicted Grant as a real person showing the good and the bad.

5) The focus on Grant’s changing views about African American rights and how complicated it was. His parents were abolitionists. His in-laws were slave owners. But he was one of the Union generals who actually pushed to let Black men join the army.

5) There was good use of Civil War re-enactments and virtual maps.

Stuff that bugged me.

1) Not enough about his relationships with his wife and kids. I know the focus was on his time in the war, but they managed to fit in plenty about how his dad picked on him and how his peers/buddies felt about him.

2) Where was his love of marbles? You think that’s not important. Then you don’t understand Grant’s marble and how he never lost them.

3) The fake beards were just…just awful. Lee’s and Lincoln’s were especially bad. The actors looked like they had carpet samples on their faces.

4) Now, the real thing that irked me- the lack of detail about Grant’s fight for Native American rights. One of my favorite Grant stories is how he became friends with a Seneca lawyer named Ely Parker when Parker came to his rescue in a bar fight! It’s a great story! Then, Parker wanted to join the army and was told by Secretary of State William Seward that the Civil War was a “white man’s war”, Grant went over Seward’s head and made Parker his military secretary. Parker wrote the surrender at Appomattox! He got respect from Lee! And when Grant was president, he and Parker tried (and failed) to give indigenous people more rights as U.S. citizens. But by all means, feel free to skip over most of that 4 hour documentary.

Parker, some other guy, and Grant at Appomattox. Okay, I was too busy ranting to find out who the middle dude is. Sorry.

Mystery of the Roanoke Documentary

The mystery of America’s first colony is one of the great unsolved events of this country’s written history.

For those of you who don’t know, here’s the short version. Before Jamestown and that liar John Smith, English settlers colonized the “New World” on an island in North Carolina during the late 1500s. Because they essentially set-up their fort on a swamp and did not adequately prepare supplies for the new environment, their governor John White had to return to England.  Because of politics and armadas and Queen Elizabeth’s lack of interest, it was three years before he came back with help.

And when he did, the whole colony had vanished.

They left behind a single clue, the word CROATOAN carved into a post. White asked the local Croatan Native Americans, but they had no idea where the settlers had gone.

It’s a great story, right! Did they join a Native American community? Did they try to swim back to England? Did they just die out? Did aliens abduct them? The mind reels!

But that is not my mystery this week. Oh no. My mystery is how could any documentary about such a subject be boring?

History Channel aired a special on the controversial Dare Stones. The stones are a series of rocks found in the 1930s which were supposedly clues left by White’s daughter, Eleanor Dare. The stones were determined as fake decades ago, but the documentary wanted to prove that one amongst them could have been authentic.

The television special was essentially two men driving back and forth up the east coast. They talked to the same three or four people while overdramatic music would crescendo at inappropriate moments.

Every once in a while, re-enactors appeared to represent the lost colonists wandering through the woods. They were led by an actress meant to be Eleanor herself. If she was not trudging through the same patch of trees over and over again, she was staring longingly at the sea or down at a rock. That was pretty much it. Three scenes of historical re-enactment played repeatedly before or after each commercial break to buffer the footage of the two men driving.

This went on for an hour and, I confess, I dozed in and out yet could still follow everything perfectly. That should give you an idea of how little was actually said.

At the end of the hour of repetitive hypothesizing and talk of stone testing, the result was (drumroll and spoiler alert) — Inconclusive!

That’s right! All of that hemming and driving and staring into the sea and the only way to find out what they decided is to watch the TWO HOUR follow-up documentary featuring the same men. I don’t think I could do it.

This is nothing against the people on the program or what they were trying to do. The mystery here is how could they take something so fascinating and make it so damn boring

Even the actress playing Eleanor Dare looked bored and she got a free trip to the beach!