The Stories We Tell: Historical Thinking on Film

I don’t recall which of my friends recommended this documentary, but Jodi and I finally watched it last night. It’s fantastic.

If were teaching regularly, I would use this at the start of a course to emphasize several points about good historical thinking: memory, competing narratives, perspective, sources, selection, emphasis, context, presentism, and on and on. I can’t recommend this enough to all of my historian friends.

Have you seen it? What did you think? What other films or documentaries put the full range of historical thinking on display? – TL

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