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Instructor: Eugene Henry

HIST 3001A
FALL 2026

Course Description:
The ubiquity of screens, in Western society at least, has become something of a running gag. Maybe
you’ve seen the meme: “Another day of staring at the big screen while scrolling through my little screen
as a reward for staring at the medium screen all week.” Even if the little screen began its life as a phone
and the medium screen a word processor, they’re now decidedly used for what the O.G. ‘big screen’
was: a site for displaying moving pictures, often accompanied by sound – what were known as at their
inception over 125 years ago, and still are, as movies. If the film medium isn’t entirely new – certainly
not as recent as the current omnipresence of screens of all sizes – some worthwhile questions for us
historians to ask ourselves are: Will visual media ultimately reshape or “wipe out” traditional forms of
history and historical consciousness? Can film legitimately be said to do “history”? If so, by what
standards should it be judged? Do cinematic depictions add to or detract from historical knowledge and
public understanding? To approach these questions, each week we will screen a historical film from
different places, times, and genres. Supported by course readings and in-class discussions, you will learn
how to assess their value to historians and evaluate them as histories in their own right.
Films and written history both construct pasts and neither can claim a literal window on a vanished
reality, but history on film often conveys metaphorical truths rather than advancing a compendium of
empirical data, footnotes, bibliographies, and the like. Often, it’s the absence of these elements of
written history that leads some to discount the veracity of historical films or ignore their potential as
conveyors of public history. Arguments erupt over misrepresented, misplaced, or missing ‘facts’, or over
the use of generic or proximal constructions, and the fictive exigencies of representing the past visually
and aurally on screen. In other words, what movie making requires as a medium. Nevertheless, discrete
elements of a film are often singled out to disqualify the whole on the grounds of historical inaccuracy.
So, do films shape collective historical memory? Probably most would admit they do. Nevertheless, the
tools for assessing history films, or filmmakers as historians, are still highly contentious and debated.
This course endeavours to address the questions mentioned above and many others that are often
asked by historians, journalists, cinephiles, educators, and many more. We’ll learn how to disentangle
these arguments from multiple perspectives and positions.