KEY READINGS | BOOKS

KIM NELSON

Making History Move builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture, proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age, charting a path to understand the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past.

Publication Date: March 15, 2024

NICOLE BASARABA

Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage focuses on theoretical approaches to the analysis and creative practice of developing non-fiction digital transmedia narratives in the rapidly growing cultural heritage sector.

Publication Date: Jan 29, 2024

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

History on Film/Film on History has established itself as a classic treatise on the historical film and its role in bringing the past to life. In the fourth edition of this widely acclaimed text, Robert A. Rosenstone argues that to leave history films out of the discussion of the meaning of the past is to ignore a major means of understanding historical events.

Publication Date: Nov 30, 2023

MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON, KIM NELSON, & MIA E.M. TREACEY

The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding history in moving images. It engages this popular and dynamic field that has evolved rapidly from film and television to digital streaming into the age of user-created content.

Publication Date: Nov 6, 2023

ROBERT BURGOYNE

A look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century. Drawing attention to changes in gender dynamics and the focus on war’s lasting psychological effects within recent films, Robert Burgoyne demonstrates how cinema both reflects and reveals the national imaginary.

Publication Date: Oct 10, 2023

CHRISTINE SPRENGLER

Fractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade presents a two-pronged argument that (1) cinema has helped define the 1950s by contributing in considerable and meaningful ways to the process of periodization and thus a general conception of the decade, and (2) cinema has fractured our sense of the 1950s.

Publication Date: April 14, 2023

EFRÉN CUEVAS

In recent decades, in line with historiographical trends advocating “history from below,” a different type of historical documentary has emerged, focusing on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efrén Cuevas categorizes these films as “microhistorical documentaries” and examines how they push cinema’s capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions.

Publication Date: Jan 11, 2022

RASMUS GREINER

Film scholar Rasmus Greiner develops a theoretical model for the concept of the histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modelled, physically experienceable historical world. Greiner examines the spatial and temporal organization of historical films and presents discussions of mood and atmosphere, body and memory, and genre and historical consciousness.

Publication Date: May 19, 2021

JONATHAN STUBBS

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America.

Publication Date: Feb 21, 2019

ELEFTHERIA THANOULI

History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness.

Publication Date: Oct 18, 2018

MIA TRACEY

Reframing the Past traces what historians have written about film and television from 1898 until the early 2000s. Mia Treacey argues that historical engagement with film and television should be reconceptualised as Screened History: an interdisciplinary, international field of research to incorporate and replace what has been known as ‘History and Film’.

Publication Date: March 3, 2016

JOHN TRAFTON

Throughout film history, war films have been in constant dialogue with both previous depictions of war and contemporary debates and technology. War films remember older war film cycles and draw upon the resources of the present day to say something new about the nature of war.

Publication Date: Feb 9, 2016

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE & CONSTANTIN PARVULESCU

Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research.

Publication Date: Dec 2, 2015

ALISON LANDSBERG

Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers.

Publication Date: June 2, 2015

CHRIS KEMPSHALL

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games.

Publication Date: May 15, 2015

JONATHAN STUBBS

Although precise definitions have not been agreed on, historical cinema tends to cut across existing genre categories and establishes an intimidatingly large group of films. In recent years, a lively body of work has developed around historical cinema, much of it proposing valuable new ways to consider the relationship between cinematic and historical representation.

Publication Date: March 28, 2013

ROBERT BURGOYNE

A comprehensive analysis of the historical film—a popular and controversial genre that’s been with us since the early days of cinema—and Hollywood’s unique ability to reshape our viewpoints while it sensually recreates the past.

Publication Date: Feb 11, 2008

MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON

This helpful introductory text blends historical and methodological issues with real examples to create a systematic guide to issues involved in using historical film in the study of history. History Goes to the Movies is a much-needed overview of an increasingly popular subject.

Publication Date: Sept 29, 2006

ALISON LANDSBERG

Instead of compartmentalizing American experience, the technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender to share collective memories—to assimilate as personal experience historical events through which they themselves did not live.

Publication Date: April 14, 2004

PHILIP ROSEN

An innovative study of the intersections between history and film. Exploring the modern category of history in relation to film theory, film textuality, and film history, Change Mummified makes a persuasive argument for the centrality of historicity to film as well as the special importance of film in historical culture.

Publication Date: Oct 22, 2001

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS

The written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film.

Publication Date: March 14, 2000

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past.

Publication Date: Jan 1, 1995

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

Can filmed history measure up to written history? What happens to history when it is recorded in images, rather than words? Can images convey ideas and information that lie beyond words? Taking on these timely questions, Robert Rosenstone pioneers a new direction in the relationship between history and film.

Publication Date: Aug 4, 1998

ROBERT BURGOYNE

Robert Burgoyne uses historical analysis to elucidate a range of historical arguments and interprestations in Bertolucci's 1900. His central proposition that the narrative patterning in all historical films vests them with the power of historical explanation provides a basis for understanding the genre of historical film.

Publication Date: Jan 1, 1991

JOHN E. O’CONNOR

History teachers should be less concerned with having students try to re-experience the past and more concerned with teaching them how to learn from the study of it. Keeping this in mind, teachers should integrate more critical film and television analysis into their history classes, but not in place of reading or at the expense of traditional approaches.

Publication Date: 1987

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS

The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer’s day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent.

Publication Date: Oct 15, 1984