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Atlantic Magazine feature on DJ Spooky

Why Remix The Birth of a Nation?

A live multimedia performance by the musician DJ Spooky considers the 1915 silent film’s legacy as a pioneering document in alternative facts.

In some dark corners, The Birth of a Nation might be received as enthusiastically today as it was when it debuted in 1915. The silent dramatization of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House, with President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet in attendance. While violent racism is not tolerated so openly as it was during Wilson’s day, vintage white nationalism is making a comeback in the Trump era.

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