This course explores how popular Hollywood films construct versions of the historical past, and can be utilized as historical documents themselves. The films reach mass audiences, they entertain, they mythologize, they produce compelling narratives about the past, they simplify complex problems, and they have been influential in creating audiences’ historical understanding. Hollywood films are significant and complex cultural texts, and this course will study them as artifacts of a powerful communications entertainment industry whose visions of the past and arguments regarding social, political, economic order throughout the 20th century and into the 21st centuries warrants our close examination.