Thomas Doherty is one of the world's most prominent social historians of American film and television. His most recent book, Hitler and Hollywood (Columbia University Press), based on extensive archival research, has been widely praised for its painstaking account and incisive analysis of the American film industry's response to Nazism in the pre-war years. This work has also played a central role during recent months in a fierce debate about Hollywood's relationship to Hitler and National Socialism. Ben Urwand, the author of The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press), argues that the major American studios blatantly collaborated with the Nazis so as to protect their own business interests. Doherty considers these incendiary charges to be unwarranted and overstated; indeed, he has called Urwand's study "slanderous and ahistorical." American film studios, maintains Doherty, did much to sound the alarm against Nazism. His own account stresses Hollywood's resistance to the Nazis rather than its collaboration with German interests.
Please join us for Professor Doherty's exciting contribution to this important debate and what surely will be a lively discussion!
