In our increasingly visual culture, a growing amount of what we learn about history comes from the movies. Popular films both represent and misrepresent the historical past. Hollywoods America offers a succinct, readable history of American film and an engaging exploration of how particular films and stars illuminate particular historical eras. Carefully selected primary sources provide additional insights into the ways that Hollywood films have shaped the public imagination and provide examples of how to interpret classic American films as artifacts of a shifting American culture. It is the only available text to combine original, primary source documents with essays from acclaimed scholars of the history of film. Now in its fifth edition, this classic text has been revised throughout to include nine new chapters, with entries ranging from the first experiments with motion pictures all the way to the present day. There is a greater overall emphasis on recent film history, with additional chapters on superheroes for the twenty-first century, a look at the social revolution on screen, and a review of films on Christianity, Hollywood, and the Culture Wars. In addition, the volume includes new primary source documents that cannot be found online, providing easy accessibility to researchers and students alike.