History through Movies

In a way, you can think of movies as books in video format. Instead of reading stories, you’re watching them.

I’d always thought it would be neat to see a timeline of the settings of historical movies. A quick search online turned up a few of good ones. However, the ones I found suffer a few flaws.

First of all, not all of the movies listed are serious historical movies. Some of the movies, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Life of Brian, or The 13th Warrior, are not meant to depict an accurate representation of history.

Also, a listing of hundreds of movies on a timeline is not really useful to most people. There needs to be some curation of good movies vs. bad movies, historically accurate vs. historically inaccurate movies, and the location and context of the movies.

My vision of the perfect historical movie timeline is one that is searchable to create custom lists of movies, and takes into account the quality of the movies for historical learning purposes.