Greetings--
Lavolta Press wrote:
Let's face it, history is neither particularly valued nor particularly
job-getting in our society.
Tell me about it. PhD in history. Now working as a project manager (a
job I love, by the way--and doing the doctorate was great prep work!)
My bet is that most college history professors seeing enthusiastic
enrollment increase after a major film for that era is released, waft
a mental "Thanks!" to the producers.
Having been in academia when a number of these movies came out, I can
tell you they don't really do all that much for enrollment in history
classes, unless someone goes out of their way to target a class
specifically at the time period or topic covered in the movie, and to
gear the class for those who wouldn't have otherwise taken a history
class. The general history classes most non-historians take are too
broad to benefit from interest generated by a focused historical movie,
and those who are taking higher-level courses which would have a closer
focus would likely have taken them anyway.
I was a TA when that Scottish film came out. It got a little tiring
after awhile continually debunking it. If it had brought about
pertinent and probing questions about the period at hand (we've had some
excellent historical movies that have done that--just not much for the
medieval period), it would have been a different story altogether. But
that particular movie didn't. (The part that got *very* old very quickly
was the whole "right of the first night" thing that the movie claims
Edward promulgated on the Scots. Grr.)
I don't even want to think about what church historians and Renaissance
historians are going to go through when the Da Vinci Code movie comes
out. There are going to be an awful lot of people who will think it's
entirely factual.
Susan
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