NEW TWO-HOUR DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES
THE LIFE OF ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL AND MYTHIC
FIGURES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
~ Custer’s Last Stand
on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE ~
January 2012
(Boston, MA) – America had
just finished celebrating its 100th birthday, when,
on July 6, 1876, the telegraph brought word that General
George Armstrong Custer and 261 members of his Seventh
Cavalry column had been massacred by Cheyenne and Lakota
warriors along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.
The news was greeted with stunned disbelief. How could
Custer, the “boy general” of the Civil War, America’s
most celebrated Indian fighter have been struck down
by a group of warriors armed with little more than bows
and arrows?
Like everything else about
Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and
contradictions, and the final act of his larger-than-life
career was played out on a grand stage with a spellbound
public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death
would launch one of the greatest myths in American history.
Custer’s Last Stand, a two-hour biography of
one of the most celebrated and controversial icons of
nineteenth-century America, paints a penetrating psychological
portrait of Custer’s charismatic, narcissistic personality,
explores the fateful relationships within the officers
of the Seventh Cavalry that would lead him to his doom.
This new biography allows viewers to take a fresh look
at Custer’s passionate love affair with his wife Libbie,
and their mutually ambitious partnership that made them
the power couple of the 1870s.
From Custer’s heroic exploits
on the battlefields of the Civil War, to his often brutal
subjugation of the Indians of the Southern Plains, to
his highly publicized expedition into the Black Hills,
Custer was a man in a hurry, desperately trying to “be”
Custer, struggling to maintain the fame that had come
to define him. Directed by Stephen Ives (Seabiscuit
and The West), Custer’s Last Stand will premiere
on the PBS series AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on Tuesday, January
17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. ET (check local listings), part
of a month-long salute to the West that also includes
the premiere of Billy the Kid (January 10) and rebroadcasts
of Wyatt Earp, Geronimo, Annie Oakley and Jesse James.
Nathaniel Philbrick, author of The Last Stand, says,
“[Custer] identified with them [Native Americans] very
strongly, prided himself on knowledge of their rituals
and lifestyle. But, on the other hand, he’s part of
white civilization and saw them as a primitive race…”
Historian Michael A. Elliott,
says that Custer is controversial for the same reasons
he was so successful. He was an outsized personality
who embodies many things that make us uncomfortable
about American history — the way that Americans sometimes
rush into a military action, the way that America has
treated American Indians and other peoples now around
the world. These are questions that are really raw and
nagging and we haven’t resolved them.
###
|
|
