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When Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York was finally released in 2002 (the film had been in the works since the 1970s1), it was met with mixed reviews for its melodramatic vengeance narrative set against the backdrop of Civil War-era New York City. The film was almost universally praised, however, for getting the details of nineteenth-century life in New York City right-for looking and feeling authentic. For example, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, "With a meticulousness both loving and obsessive, [Scorsese] has resurrected an era that's been buried under concrete for the past century and a half-the gangland days of the mid-19th century. It's the movie's one great achievement and can't be dismissed. Scorsese takes us to a New York we never knew existed and shows us so much we can almost smell it" (D14). A. O. Scott of the New York Times goes even further, linking this attention to detail to a kind of transcendent historical truth: "[Scorsese] wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to explain how we-New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption-got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones."
Historians, however, weren't as generous to the film. Timothy Gilfoyle, for instance, excoriates Scorsese for presenting an often muddled and inaccurate historical narrative. The problem isn't that Scorsese took liberties with the facts, since that is the prerogative of artists, Gilfoyle explains, but that "Scorsese sees himself as a historian" (621). By giving subtitles with locations and dates, by showing the audience nineteenth-century engravings, reproductions of broadsides, and Mathew Brady Civil War photographs, Scorsese implies he is rendering history on the screen, not mere entertainment. And this "substitution of myth for history" (623), writes Gilfoyle, is at its worst in the film's representation of the New York City draft riots of July 1863.
Gilfoyle is correct in his characterization. For while the advent of the draft clearly sparked the riots-and is what gives the riots their name-the New York City draft riots were also race riots, a fact difficult to discern in Scorsese's drama about feuding white...