Warriors of Honor DVD

When Sam sprained his ankle last month, I was happy to have a new video to review that he could watch while keeping his feet up.

We received the Warriors of Honor DVD from New Liberty Videos.  Sam said it was good.  He mentioned that it gave him some insight and things to think about.

Eli watched it later, and he thought it was really interesting.  He used the words "historical" and "learningish" when describing it.  When asked what stuck with him, he mentioned a firing squad scene.

Jack, who is 10, watched part of the movie, but wandered off about half way through.  When I asked him what he thought of it, he told me, "It was okay.  It would have been better if there wasn't that voice in the background, and if it had been all war."  Um, that would be the narrator he's referring to, and the war wasn't actually the focus of the documentary.  Looks like it was pretty much over his head at this point.

Paul and I watched Warriors of Honor together, and he said, "There's a perspective you won't get in public schools."

One of the early quotes that stuck out to me was that the Civil War was a battle between two different cultures.  I think that's a really interesting point.  The United States is still not entirely cohesive from sea to shining sea, even in this age of rapid travel and social media.  It's easy to see how two separate worlds could have evolved in our fledgling nation long ago, as the north focused on industry and the good of the whole, and the south was a slower paced, agricultural society with a live and let live mentality that favored the rights of the individual.

Many people believe the Civil War was about slavery--and slavery was certainly a part of it.  Rebel homeschoolers might teach that the Civil War was more about local government versus national government, or state rights, and that's a part of it, too.  This American history documentary opens the mind to question the "north good, south bad" propaganda that many of us learned in school, by illuminating the character of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Thomas Jackson.  Warriors of Honor shows through letters and personal accounts that they were both men of faith.

Jackson inspired his men to follow him anywhere with devout loyalty.  He was known to be a man of near constant prayer, and a friend of blacks.

Personally, I found the bonus features as interesting as the main documentary.  The slavery feature gave a vastly different perspective and statistics that we don't hear in the "history written by the victorious North."  It indicated that free blacks were treated better in the South than they were in the North, where white men often refused to work side by side with them.

The only time I'd ever heard of Palmyra was in reference to Mormon history (and it turns out that was another Palmyra in an entirely different state), so the account of the Palmyra Massacre was shocking to me, and I wanted to research and find out more about it.  To me, that's the hallmark of a good documentary.  When you finish it and want to delve deeper into the topic, picking various threads of the tapestry presented to see where they lead.


Warriors of Honor sells for $19.95, and is intended for general audiences.  My main reviewers are 13 and 16, and while there were horrible acts of war portrayed, there wasn't anything that I felt was inappropriate for them to see, given the topic of the Civil War.  I would say this movie is most appropriate for teen and adult audiences, from a comprehension perspective.

This was a nicely done film, with haunting music and original photographs, modern photos of historical sites, and reenactment footage to give a moving look at a difficult time in our nation's history.  I would recommend it as a springboard for research for the high school student studying American history.

Other Crew families reviewed Anthem for a Nation, The Forbidden Book, Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, A Nation Adrift, and Teaching Origins Objectively, as well as Warriors of Honor.  You can read their reviews by clicking the box below.


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