Movies as the Gateway to History: The History and Film Project

REMEMBER THE OLD SAW about teaching as you are taught. That worked well enough for centuries, while innovations like the chalkboard did not radically alter technique. Today's classroom is less than ever insulated from the cultural environment, and we cannot ignore the pervasiveness of electronic mass media. Think about which has made a greater impression on the mass consciousness, myriad scholarly studies of the Normandy invasion or Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan? In the May, 2000 Perspectives, the monthly newsletter of the American Historical Association, a study of over one thousand Americans representing a cross-section of the population found that over forty percent of the participants cited movies and TV programs among the most cited means of connecting with the past.' We should acknowledge film and television as the great history educators of our time. A century after the invention of motion pictures, in the assessment of Robert Rosenstone, the visual media have become arguably the chief carrier of historical messages in our culture.2 Our tendency as professionals may be to decry this further proof of the decline of the American intellect, but with a small effort we can see great positives in the flickering light. Historian R. J. Raack believes that film is unmatched in its capacity to provide an emphatic reconstruction to convey