The birth of a nation nat turner

Nate Parker’s Nat Turner biopic The Birth of a Nation takes a fascinatingly complicated history and simplifies it into the story of one man’s heroic journey.

Which aspects of the film are faithful to the historical accounts of Turner’s slave rebellion, and which take artistic license to invent or elide key events? I read historian Patrick Breen’s 2016 book The Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, and consulted with a variety of other sources, to find out.

The role of women in the rebellion

This is the area of history-to-film translation that’s received the most pushback—which is, perhaps, not surprising, given the recently resurfaced rape allegations against the film’s writer, director, and star.

There’s some evidence that Nat Turner’s wife was actually raped before the uprising, but neither that incident, nor the rape of another woman on the Turner plantation, seem to have precipi