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The Birth of a Nation (1915) is a landmark in the development of the feature film and in the history of American racial discourse in the Jim Crow period. This article proposes that the corrective for our current perspective on The Birth of a Nation is that we more thoroughly study how the techniques of feature film inscribe and underwrite dominant racial ideologies.

Despite Uncle Tom's Cabin's “extraordinary and global importance as novel, performance, and film”, it is rarely read or taken seriously, except as a negative. But studying Uncle Tom's Cabin can provide a key to “the issues and images of black performance at the turn of the century”—and beyond.