Historians At The Movies

Historians At The Movies (HATM) is a weekly film watch party that uses twitter to connect historians and the general public. Created in 2018 by historian Jason Herbert, the basic premise is that historians and other scholars watch a film on a streaming service such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney Plus alongside a global audience, offering live commentary on the film and feedback to questions posed during the film via their personal twitter feeds. It is found on twitter via Herbert's profile or by searching for the hashtag #HATM.

HATM events typically take place on Sunday nights at 8pm eastern time. For the first two years, HATM solely viewed films available on the Netflix streaming platform though over time watched films available on Amazon Prime and Disney Plus. In one instance, HATM audiences viewed the Reconstruction miniseries available on PBS. Herbert first came up with the idea of a historians' watch party when noticing that National Treasure was available on Netflix and initially envisioned the watch party as a way to relax on a Sunday night in July. Other scholars joined in along with their respective twitter followers. Following the first event on #HATM has operated without interruption every weekend since July 15, 2018.

Herbert chooses each week's film with a variety of factors in mind: film availability on streaming platforms, how audiences respond to certain films in the past, and onscreen representation of both historical events and people. Said Herbert in 2019, "Maybe the biggest challenge I’ve had in curating our film selections is ensuring diversity in scope, era, focus, and especially casting. You hear about Hollywood making films that cater to a white audience but it doesn’t quite hit you until you start trying to find movies about people of color. The most important thing about #HATM to me is making sure people feel wanted and that their interests are being represented in our film choices."

To participate, twitter users tend to follow Jason Herbert or one of the evening's guest hosts and the hashtag for Historians At The Movies, #HATM. Herbert usually opens a discussion on the film with simple questions to get the audience talking ahead of time and then the entire community presses play at exactly 8pm eastern time on their own devices. From there, participants (Herbert refers to them as community members) tweet along with the film, tagging their posts with the #HATM hashtag so that others might find their tweets. Participation can range into the thousands of tweets in a short time. The July 3, 2020 viewing of Hamilton on Disney+ saw over 6,000 tweets tagged with the #HATM hashtag, plus tweets without the marker.

HATM has emerged as a way for people to reconsider the role films play in telling the past. Says Herbert, "along the way a feeling emerged that we had the opportunity as historians to use our movies to engage the general public over really serious issues. Coco became a way to talk about immigration, Mudbound and Black Panther about racial issues in the United States, and films like Milk or Carol became mediums to discuss LGBTQ history. Spotlight was an opportunity to discuss sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and how it was covered. Watergate via All the President’s Men offered the chance to illustrate parallels between the Nixon and Trump administrations. #HATM addresses real-world issues in real time. There’s a real opportunity to use the medium in a powerful and informative way."

References

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