My students have been participating in National History Day since my first year teaching in the public schools—more than a decade ago. Since that first year, I have grown tremendously as a teacher and as a teacher who is guiding students through the National History Day process. There's a lot I could write about National History Day. I truly think it's one of the best programs for asking students to research and then synthesize their research through a project. It allows for choice, higher-order thinking skills, and diversity in the way the project is presented.

It’s that project presentation format I want to focus on. At first, and for quite a number of years, my students participated in the exhibit category because it was my strength as a teacher, but for the last three years or so, the number of students participating in the website and documentary categories has really grown. I have continued to learn and stretch my boundaries as a teacher as well.

For those of you new to National History Day I highly suggest checking their site out online at nhd.org. In a nutshell, however, here is the program: Students choose their own topic that fits within the annual theme (this year’s theme is "Debate and Diplomacy: Successes, Failures, and Consequences"), they choose to work individually or in groups of up to five students (with the exception of the research paper), and they choose one of five categories to present their project in: research paper, documentary, performance, exhibit, or website.

The website and documentary categories are particularly wonderful for integrating social studies content and using technology to display the students’ hard work and knowledge. Here are some highlights and sticking points that I’ve found while having students work with the website and documentary categories.

Pros of Website:

• Students can pull a myriad of images, sounds, videos, and other primary sources directly from the Internet and put them on their website. This encourages students to incorporate 21st-century skills, specifically technology skills, while asking them to analyze and evaluate sources they have chosen, placing them in historical context. As with any of the venues for NHD, this also calls on historical thinking skills and meeting research standards for English Language Arts.
• It's free—as long as students have access to a computer and the Internet they can complete a website!
• It can be taken with students easily from home, to school, to aftercare.
• The website category is now streamlined through nhd.weebly.com. The beauty of this is that students who are just beginning may choose to use the drag-and-drop features of the website. Those who are more advanced may write their own HTML code to alter the site and create their own unique website.

Cons of Website:

• It's easy for students to ONLY use web sources for their project. Getting students to scan sources or construct their own videos and edit them can easily be overlooked if the teacher and parents are not vigilant.
• Students spend a lot of time with nuances of design like font and font size, sometimes to the detriment of the HISTORY of the project.

Pros of Documentary:

• Again, this type of project encourages students to incorporate 21st-century skills, specifically technology skills, while asking them to analyze and evaluate the sources they have chosen, placing them in historical context.
• Documentaries are very impressive when they are finished and done well.
• It can be very easy to map out the story, write a script, and then find the primary sources to "tell" that story.

Cons of Documentary:

• Students need to come to the project with at least a basic working knowledge of iMovie or Moviemaker.
• Students have to be prepared to spend a lot of time on the making and editing of the movie—it doesn’t have as much to do with the history of the topic, but rather presentation. This also becomes a tempting choice for the student who would rather not do as much historical work.

I think it's important to remember that it's about balance. As a teacher, I have seen students spend an inordinate amount of time on the creation of their website or documentary only to neglect the history. I've also seen students do a dynamic job of researching their topic, only to not present it in the best format because they don't allow enough time or have the background knowledge to create their presentation in the format they chose. It's very important to have a pulse of the students' strengths and time constraints when choosing the format for the project. One of the neat things is that NHD allows students to experiment with the presentation format and is a great way to highlight the integration of social studies and technology!

With planning and communication you and your students will have a great time learning history through National History Day!

Earlier this summer, Clearinghouse staff members shared some ideas for summer reading. In this installment, other staff members highlight their choices—a graphic novel, a maritime log book, film, and a political thriller.

If you've been in a bookstore lately, you've undoubtedly noticed sections and shelf space devoted to the graphic novel. Research Associate Lara Harmon is a fan of Watchmen, a 450-plus page graphic novel first published in the mid-1980s and released as a film in March 2009. One reviewer described Watchmen as the Citizen Kane of graphic novels, a multi-layered narrative that has not dulled with age. Lara agrees. "It changed perceptions of the comic book as a medium and remains a tightly-plotted, cynical look at politics, science, war, and human nature."

She recommends that educators look at how the story and characters treat Cold War anxieties, the Vietnam War, and issues of American world status and power following Vietnam.

Multimedia Developer Chris Preparato advocates Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner—later a PBS documentary series.

Chris explains, "It's part history of the settlement of the American West, part environmental study of people sustainably living in essentially the desert that is the West. The first half is a dramatized version of the settling of towns like Los Angeles and how speculators and politicians destroyed entire towns just to create water sources for the city. The second half looks at policy and ways to change current policies to make the west sustainable."

Chris also recommends Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the finest writing from a century of film. This anthology explores the history of films and how critics, authors, and others have written and talked about them. Chris sees this as a great source of film history and theory.

Research Assistant Alaina Harmon recommends Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, 1912-1913 by Robert Cushman Murphy, first published in 1947. The Daisy was a whaling ship, and Murphy, an ornithologist and former curator of birds for the American Museum of Natural History, sailed with her to the sub-Antarctic to observe and collect oceanic birds. During a four-month stop to hunt elephant seals, he collected specimens of penguins, other birds, marine mammals, and plants later deposited in the Museum of Natural History.

Murphy comments on his own activities, the processes of whaling and blubber harvesting, and life at sea, periodically sending the manuscript home to his wife, Grace, to keep her informed about his travels. Alaina comments, "As a logbook, this is a great read, since maritime logs written by sailors are far more likely to list weather, current navigational standing, any crew punishments or exasperations of the writer, whale sightings or killings if relevant, and occasional poems or lyrics. The sailing logs are fantastic for research, but Murphy's book benefits from its triple focus: maritime history and life, zoology, and museum practice."

Pondering questions about power, corruption in high places, conspiracy theories, and political vigilantes? For a change of pace and an entertaining read, suspend your critical thinking skills for this political thriller. Multimedia Associate Misha Vinokur recommends Term Limits by Vince Flynn. "It's an answer to just what could happen when ex-military commandos decide to rid Washington of corrupt officials."

This is the fourth in a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features.

Long awaited by both historians and buffs, the film Gods and Generals is a prequel to the 1993 film Gettysburg. As Gettysburg was based on the historical novel The Killer Angels (1974) by Michael Shaara, so Gods and Generals is based on the 1998 historical novel of that title written by Shaara's son Jeff. The new film's purpose is to sketch highlights of the Civil War in the eastern theater from Virginia's secession through the death of the Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

The need to set the stage for Gettysburg influenced the choice of what to cover in the almost four-hour-long prequel. For example, Gods and Generals covers the battle of Fredericksburg while entirely omitting the much more pivotal battle of Antietam. This omission occurs in part because Fredericksburg was the first combat experience of the key Gettysburg protagonist, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and because it was the event for which the Union repulse of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg was a suitable payback. One suspects that another reason the film skips Antietam is that it led to Abraham Lincoln's issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; coverage of that document might have led viewers to suspect that the war had something to do with slavery. Of this, more anon.

Like the Civil War soldiers it depicts, the film Gods and Generals has its triumphs and its defeats. In some ways it is an improvement over Gettysburg. Robert Duvall's portrayal of Robert E. Lee is infinitely superior to Martin Sheen's glassy-eyed performance in the earlier film. The makeup is better, too, so that the viewer does not see what appear to be beavers clinging to generals' chins, as in Gettysburg. And the artillery pieces actually recoil when fired.

On the other hand, Gods and Generals perpetuates some of its predecessor's weaknesses. Actors still deliver, in spoken form, lines that their characters composed for written communication, making some scenes even more stilted than the 19th century actually was. Other scenes have the feel of that favored entertainment of the mid-Victorians, the tableau vivant—but not very vivant. Sometimes it is like watching an animated wax museum.

The greatest triumph of Gods and Generals lies in Stephen Lang's splendid depiction of Stonewall Jackson. It is difficult to imagine a more authentic and convincing presentation of the renowned general. Eschewing popular mythology that makes Jackson a wild-eyed maniac, Lang presents an understandable character that is, in almost every case, true to what we know about Jackson. This is important to Gods and Generals because Jackson's role looms so large that the film might more accurately have been titled simply Stonewall Jackson.

When they wanted to do so, the makers of Gods and Generals were accurate in both detail and nuance. Unfortunately, the filmmakers preferred to spend much of the nearly four-hour running time of the movie doing a great deal of ax-grinding. The result is the most pro-Confederate film since Birth of a Nation, a veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason.

Gods and Generals brings to the big screen the major themes of Lost Cause mythology that professional historians have been working for half a century to combat. In the world of Gods and Generals, slavery has nothing to do with the Confederate cause. Instead, the Confederates are nobly fighting for, rather than against, freedom, as viewers are reminded again and again by one white southern character after another.

In stark contrast, the pro-Union, antislavery view of the war is expressed only once. In one example of this unequal presentation, viewers hear the Confederate defenders of the famous sunken lane at Fredericksburg exclaiming that they are fighting for freedom and independence, but the Union attackers, members of the renowned Irish Brigade, make only trivial comments. Yet historical sources document in the Irishmen's own eloquent words why they, as immigrants, believed they ought to fight for the Union. The filmmakers did not see fit to have any of the actors mouth those lines.
Similarly, the film depicts slaves as generally happy, vaguely desiring freedom at some future date, but faithful and supportive of their beloved masters and the cause of the Confederacy. Slaveholders in the film treat their slaves like family or better, and the slaves reciprocate by doing their best to protect their masters' property from the invading Yankees. The many thousand times more numerous slaves who eagerly sought freedom and aided Union soldiers are invisible in Gods and Generals.

Another aspect of Lost Cause mythology depicted in the film deals with religion. Echoing pro-Confederate claims since the war itself, the movie represents the South as being uniquely and sincerely Christian, while the North has at most a vague spirituality. In fact, both sides had about an equal representation of Christianity. Once again, Gods and Generals presents a skewed depiction of history through judicious omission. While the film—for the most part accurately—presents Stonewall Jackson as a saint in every sense of the word, viewers never learn that Oliver O. Howard, the Union general whose troops Jackson's men so savagely attacked at Chancellorsville, was an even more fervently evangelical soldier.

Jackson's attack at Chancellorsville is the dramatic climax to the film and a neo-Confederate's dream of paradise. As Jackson rides boldly forward flanked by staff officers, the mounted party gallops toward the viewer, larger than life, and the score swells, simultaneously triumphant and otherworldly, a fittingly Wagnerian style of accompaniment for this ride of the Confederate valkyries. Any lingering doubts as to the filmmakers' sympathies promptly vanish.

The final scene at Jackson's deathbed is meant to be sad, and it is indeed very moving. Yet I left the showing quite sad in a different way. Despite the makers' large expenditures and serious efforts toward accuracy in some details, they marred the result by their willingness to perpetuate a distorted view of the Civil War.

What constitutes the limits of dramatic license in fictional motion pictures set within the framework of a historical event? Filmmakers have regularly argued that the need for drama always outweighs the need for plausibility and historical accuracy. Audiences have generally bought the argument, as have the filmmakers themselves. Does it matter that Steven Spielberg portrays the Pentagon receiving word of the death of two Ryan brothers on Omaha Beach within two days of D-Day? Does it matter that a German fighter plane flew to the vicinity of Greenland as shown in U-571? Does it matter that Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders never flew in formation during the attack on Tokyo as shown in Pearl Harbor?

Who cares? After watching U-571, one person said, “If I want to see the truth, I will watch PBS.” But does falsifying or fabricating events add to the drama, or is good drama incompatible with truth? Clearly painting the name Enola Gay on the wrong side of the fuselage in The Beginning or the End (1947) and Above and Beyond (1952) adds nothing to the drama of Paul Tibbets's mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Does the mistake matter? On the other hand, portraying Tibbets as feeling guilty for carrying out his assignment, as Above and Beyond clearly does, falsifies history. Do the directors' justification that they could not show an American officer in 1952 willingly killing 80,000 people suffice?

Jonathan Mostow, director of U-571, claimed he was making a fictional story, not a documentary, about life aboard a submarine during the battle of the Atlantic and therefore he did not have to portray history accurately. Nevertheless, the British immediately took offense, claiming he was turning the Royal Navy's capture of an Enigma machine from a German submarine in 1941 into an American heist in 1942. Mostow denied he was doing this, pointing out that the British used a destroyer while he used a submarine. With U-571, the problems had less to do with history than with plausibility. The Germans did fly four-engine patrol planes over the North Atlantic but certainly not single-engine fighters. Whether an American submarine disguised as a German submarine might capture a U-boat might not be too farfetched, at least as portrayed in the movie. But having a second German submarine, in the dark of night, in a driving rainstorm recognize what was happening and figure out which one to torpedo stretches credibility beyond any realistic limits. Likewise, having the American boarding party know how immediately to start the disabled German submarine and get underway strains believability. Worse, submariners have attested to the virtual impossibility of one submarine torpedoing another submarine when both were submerged with the technology available early in the war.

U-571 remains probably the most exciting submarine movie ever made. Nevertheless, the factual and historical errors in the film prevented the director, Mostow, from fulfilling his goal of providing the contemporary generation with any real sense of life aboard a World War II submarine. His response to critics of the film: “Hey folks, it's only a movie.” In contrast, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay tried to have it both ways with Pearl Harbor. On one hand, both men claimed they were making a fictional movie using the historical events only as the stage on which to create a love story. On the other hand, Bay predicted before the start of production, “You will see what happened at Pearl Harbor like you have never seen it in any other movie. Our goal is to stage the event with utmost realism.” He claimed that he wanted his Pearl Harbor movie to become one “by which all other films are measured,” dismissing Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) as being “more of a documentary.”

To achieve these goals, Bay and Bruckheimer claimed to have read extensively in the histories about Pearl Harbor and to have interviewed many Pearl Harbor and Doolittle raid survivors. Noting that everyone had his or her own memories that did not always agree with others' on particular aspects of the Japanese attack, the filmmakers felt their re-creation was as valid as any of the recollections.

Of course, all memories are created equal, but some are more equal; where truth conflicted with drama, Bay and Bruckheimer chose to go with the drama, claiming they had captured the essence of what had happened on December 7. In fact, “essence” remains a very subjective term that can conceal a plethora of sins. One of the trailers for the film perhaps said it best: “Pearl Harbor is a fictional tale crafted from a kaleidoscope of real life personal experiences of those living through this terrifying tragedy.” The operative word is “fictional.” So little of what appears on the screen bears even a remote resemblance to actual events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the actual attack, or the aftermath, including the Doolittle raid, that audiences come away from the film with no real understanding of what happened and why. If the film's title had remained “Tennessee,” the original code name Disney gave the project to hide its actual subject, Bay and Bruckheimer, like Mostow, could have hidden behind the claim that they were only making a dramatic movie, not a documentary.

However, the title Pearl Harbor and Bay's predictions about what he intended to do strongly suggest the film is providing a reasonably accurate account of what happened on December 7. Historians have to be careful to criticize the elephants, not the ants, when discussing the dramatic license filmmakers take in their movies. But audiences have to know little or nothing about Pearl Harbor to recognize the errors or fabrications. In view of the recent attention given to President Franklin D. Roosevelt because of the dedication of his memorial, most people understand that he simply could not stand up unaided, as happens in the movie.

Likewise, since the movie portrays the growing tensions between Japan and the United States and relates at least superficially the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor, audiences are going to wonder how one of the heroes could manage to get permission to fly his P-40 over Pearl Harbor at dusk. While Bay commented with pride about the film's signature shot of a bomb falling slowly downward toward the Arizona, people recognize the hokiness of the sequence even if they do not know that the battleship was hit after the Oklahoma, not before, as portrayed.

In fact, the reviewer has compiled a five-page list of “flaws” in Pearl Harbor. Do they matter? Only to the extent that truth itself matters. For most historians the liberties the filmmakers took with the facts render Pearl Harbor useless as a tool to teach students about the Japanese attack. From the Japanese perspective, however, the film has a significant upside. Most people went to see Pearl Harbor for the love story and the explosions and so left the theater without any significant antagonism toward those friendly people who brought the United States into World War II and later began making fine cars, cameras, television sets, and video recorders.

This marks the beginning of a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features. Look for one each month!

In December 1997, I underwent a metamorphosis (temporary, I hope) from cultural historian to "Titanic historian." As such, I was repeatedly called upon to assess the "historical accuracy" of James Cameron's movie.

This, I tried to explain, was a task better left to others, especially to the subset of Titanic buffs known derisively as rivet counters, since what the questioners usually meant by historical accuracy largely had to do with the verisimilitude of the movie's sets and special effects—for example, did Cameron get the carpets right? The best I could do was point out a few of the most obvious anachronisms: Rose (Kate Winslet) using Tom Wolfe's phrase "masters of the universe" to describe her fellow first-cabin passengers; Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) quoting Bob Dylan—"When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose"—to assert his free-spiritedness; Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon apparently going down with the ship.

And so on. Very soon, however, this line of inquiry loses its interest. "Is this history or Hollywood?" I was asked at the end of a History Channel program called Movies in Time, as if it has to be one or the other, unvarnished or embellished, accurate or inaccurate. When a film costs and earns more than any other, when it becomes a major cultural phenomenon, we ought to be asking questions about Titanic's historical significance rather than its accuracy. How might we explain its resonance? How might we contextualize it? How might we compare it to previous representations of the disaster? How, in short, might we really locate this movie in time?

In the wake of Titanicmania, several critics took on these broader questions. Frank Rich observed in the New York Times that Titanic "was destined to be truer to 1997 than 1912, no matter how faithfully the director, James Cameron, reproduced every last brandy snifter of the White Star Line."

In Rich's view, Cameron's "rich-bashing populism"—the fact that the first-class passengers are despicable almost without exception—signals that a resentment of the wealthy and powerful is bubbling beneath the surface of our apparent prosperity and contentment. Rich also described Winslet's Rose as a "feminist heroine who defies her stuffy First Class compatriots to take up with a guy in steerage."

Seeking an explanation for the movie's popularity with girls and women, Katha Pollitt in the Nation pointed to the anti-macho, androgynous, quasi-maternal figure of DiCaprio's Jack. The movie's "feminism," Pollitt wrote, is a "women's fantasy" of "costless liberation brought to you by a devoted, selfless, charming, funny, incredibly handsome lover."

This costless liberation marks the movie as what Rich calls "very much a 90's take on the familiar Titanic themes of gender and class." Through Jack, Rose learns to feel good about herself, to overcome oppression by overcoming repression. She dances with the steerage, stands on the bow with the breeze blowing through her hair, poses nude, has sex in a car in the ship's hold. The disaster is presented here for the first time as a kind of therapy: for Rose, the burdens of gender and class are swept away by Jack and the sea, even though her nasty mother and fiance survive. True to Hollywood's therapeutic ethos, Titanic depicts liberation as a matter of attitude rather than politics, self-actualization rather than collective struggle.

Cameron's revisionism is thrown into relief when we compare his handling of these themes with earlier versions of the disaster. In 1912, most stories of the wreck gave the first-cabin men a monopoly on heroism. A widely published wire service report envisioned John Jacob Astor and other first-class heroes "stepping aside, bravely, gallantly remaining to die that the place [they] otherwise might have filled could perhaps be taken by some sabot-shod, shawl-enshrouded, illiterate, and penniless peasant woman of Europe."

While Hollywood has not yet reached the point where the characters listed in Titanic's credits as "Syrian woman" or "Chinese man" occupy center screen, neither do the darker-skinned steerage passengers have a monopoly on panic as they did in 1912 depictions. Nor does Jack's heroism appear to be a racial trait. "The Anglo-Saxon may yet boast that his sons are fit to rule the earth," read an April 19, 1912, editorial in the Atlanta Constitution, "so long as men choose death with the courage they must have displayed when the great liner crashed into the mountains of ice, and the aftermath brought its final test."

The movie's "feminism" also stands in stark contrast to the antifeminist "lessons" that the disaster called forth in 1912. First-cabin chivalry, nowhere in evidence in Cameron's Titanic, was widely invoked as an argument against women suffrage. "Let the suffragists remember this," advised a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun. "When the Lord created woman and placed her under the protection of man he had her well provided for. The Titanic disaster proves it very plainly." A letter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it even more bluntly: "I suggest, henceforth, when a woman talks woman's rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more—just Titanic." The movie clearly suggests that "the law of the sea"—"Women and Children First"—was the result, not of chivalry, but of the officers' orders, enforced at gunpoint.

Unlike Cameron's apolitical hero and heroine, those who resisted these "lessons" about class and gender in 1912 did so in explicitly political terms. Feminists and working-class radicals interpreted the disaster as a catalyst to collective action. "To the woman-heart of the nation this is not a tragedy to mourn and grieve over and forget," wrote the suffragist Agnes Ryan in the Woman's Journal;

it is simply typical of the countless lives that perish needlessly each year from the Ship of State! It gives new proof that the State needs women in law-making and law-enforcing, and it gives new impetus to the Votes for Women movement.

An Italian anarchist newspaper in Buffalo insisted that capitalists were to blame for the Titanic and all the lesser known disasters of industrial society, because they

uphold a society which considers profit more important than human life. . . . We, who struggle with every weapon at our disposal to overthrow the present social system, will avenge one day not too far distant all of your victims, including those of the "Titanic."

Compared to this, the movie that Newsweek called "quasi-Marxist" seems very nineties indeed.

Two hundred million dollars buys an awful lot of popular memory. But Cameron's Titanic is not the first attempt to tell the definitive story of the disaster, nor is it likely to be the last. "Historical accuracy" aside, the eighty-six-year effort to define the Titanic's significance may be the most compelling story of all.

Today, when it seems that everyone is getting a make-over, so are the suffragists. Iron Jawed Angels, a recent film by HBO, dramatizes the final years of the American woman suffrage movement, from 1912 to the winning of the vote in 1920. Historians familiar with the classic documentary One Woman, One Vote (1996) will be amused by how the suffragists have been updated and recast to mirror our own contemporary sensibilities. This film portrays these women as you have never seen them before: shopping for fashionable hats, smoking and lounging in their undergarments, and marching to a soundtrack of hip-hop rhythms. They are more than “new women”; they are 21st-century women in their casual manner, informal speech, and attitudes toward men and sexuality. With this approach, the film modernizes our political foremothers in an attempt to win new audiences in a postfeminist age.

Tensions between veteran activists and “new suffragists” are at the heart of the story. Hilary Swank stars as the outspoken and determined Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor plays her faithful comrade, Lucy Burns. The dynamic duo represents the more youthful, radical wing of the movement, which confronts the more conservative Carrie Chapman Catt (Anjelica Huston) and Anna Howard Shaw (Lois Smith), president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Allied with the Democratic party and the new president, Woodrow Wilson, Catt continues to support a gradual state-by-state campaign. She is portrayed as traditional, stuffy, and arrogant compared to the playful, optimistic, and impatient Paul who launches public demonstrations, supports a federal suffrage amendment, demands immediate results, and condemns the Democrats and Wilson, even in the midst of war. Paul and her allies eventually split with NAWSA to form a separate organization, the National Woman's Party. While historians have focused on the militant tactics of the new suffragists, the film fixates on their colorful personalities to separate them further from the old guard.

Although the filmmakers try to reinvent the image of the suffragists, the storyline is based on the real troubles and triumphs of the campaign's final years. For an audience new to women's history, it conveys the very serious barriers to women's political participation and social justice. When the activists are physically attacked as they protest peacefully, the true hostility toward woman suffrage comes alive. The movie also contains a chilling portrayal of Paul's jail experience, showing her psychoanalyzed in the mental ward and violently force-fed after initiating a hunger strike. The film even acknowledges the racial tensions between white suffragists and African American activists, highlighting Paul's conflict with Ida B. Wells before the Washington, DC, parade in 1913. The film does take many liberties, however. For example, it overstates the influence of the radicals in winning the vote, downplaying the concerted effort of the entire suffrage spectrum and the impact of women's work and volunteerism during World War I. While historians have described Alice Paul as intellectually vigorous, personally conservative, and politically militant, the film transforms her into a spunky rebel who knows how to have fun but is still fully committed to her cause.

Is this what it takes to attract new audiences to women's history? In an age when many young women resist the feminist label, the film invites them to connect with feminists who are single, young, independent, sexually vibrant, and, of course, physically attractive. But this emphasis on beauty and charisma would surely disturb the suffragists, who would find these characters very foreign. This approach will also irritate historians of gender who have worked hard to define the suffragists as serious political actors and to integrate them into the American historical narrative. Viewed with a critical eye, Iron Jawed Angels could be useful for instructing students about history and popular culture, Hollywood and historical interpretation. It also forces us to grapple with more than feminism and its discontents. It can generate needed reflection on the ways historians can also be guilty of constructing historical personalities as they want to see them, by ignoring issues of race or dismissing the personal failures of our subjects. The challenge, then, remains to promote interest in women's history and still teach about who we think the suffragists were, rather than who we want them to be.

This is the third in a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features.

Some talented people have the misfortune to enter popular memory in their decrepitude. Howard Hughes's name, when joined with "crazy" or "Las Vegas," produces far more results in an Internet search than when it is joined with "twa" or "Constellation." It is the phobias and the fingernails that most people remember, not the aviation achievements.

The chief virtue of Martin Scorsese's The Aviator is that it restores Hughes to his rightful place as one of America's great aviation visionaries. As in most biopics, messy details are simplified, and characters are conflated or altered. Scorsese and the writer John Logan have reduced complex business deals to spur-of-the-moment decisions and edited out their hero's racism. Hughes liked African Americans about as much as he liked germs, though you would never know it from watching the film. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hughes as a troubled but socially beneficent hero like those in Ayn Rand's novels. He's Howard Roark, but with more neuroses and ready cash.

By contrast, Scorsese and Logan darken Juan Trippe's character. Alec Baldwin portrays the head of Pan American Airways as a smarmy airline vulture, plotting with meretricious politicians to take over the world's air routes, on display in his posh office. Trippe was a schemer, but he was as concerned with long-term survival as with achieving monopoly. He knew that Pan Am needed domestic feeder routes and that his airline would be at a competitive disadvantage if limited to overseas operations. World War II had left twa (which Hughes renamed Trans World Airlines) in a position to develop both domestic and international routes. Trippe's attempt to use political pressure to force Hughes to sell TWA was, in a business sense, perfectly rational. Had Trippe gotten his way, Pan Am might still be flying.

What Scorsese and Logan get right about aviation history is just as important. They understand the central emotional paradox of Hughes's generation of aviation pioneers. In order to make aviation pay, they had to kill the spirit of adventure that had attracted them to flying in the first place. Hughes loved hot planes. But he knew that attracting paying customers meant making flying as comfortable and risk-free as possible. He worked with manufacturers to develop larger, faster, and more reliable airliners equipped with pressurized cabins. Planes such as the Constellation could fly high above the weather, minimizing drag and airsickness while whisking passengers across the country. Hughes's aggressive pursuit of this vision—he ends the film obsessing about jets as "the way of the future"—helped the airline industry revolutionize long-distance passenger service. Like all revolutions, this one exacted a price. The railroads' Pullman car business died off, as did the romance of flying. Pressurized equipment made the distant landscape seem barely worth a glance from vestigial windows. Bernard DeVoto called cross-country flying "the dullest mode of travel." Many a conference-bound historian has shared the thought.

One of the contradictions of Hughes's career is that his other youthful obsession, filmmaking, got in the way of making flying a mass business. Hell's Angels (1930), which cost four lives and as many millions of dollars to film, featured colliding planes and stoic airmen plunging to their deaths. Hughes shot so much spectacular footage that the unused film turned up in at least seven other movies, among them Hughes's own Sky Devils(1932). What was good for the box office was not necessarily good for the airlines. Aviation boosters hated the crash-and-burn movies because they reinforced anxieties about flying. If Hughes the technological visionary wanted to expand air travel, Hughes the filmmaker was spitting into the wind. Scorsese gaudily colorizes one of the most notorious scenes in Hell's Angels, that of a pilot burning alive in his cockpit. The gesture may be an acknowledgment of the contradiction, or an ironic reference to Scorsese's own fear of flying, or both.

Youthful, handsome, and tall (the compact DiCaprio makes us forget that Hughes was 6′ 4″), Hughes carried on several affairs with movie stars during his filmmaking career. Scorsese uses these romances and his own encyclopedic knowledge of film history to re-create Hollywood's interwar culture—its nightlife, its gossip industry, its cult of bosomy celebrity. Cate Blanchett does a superb turn as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale wields a sharp wit as Ava Gardner. Hollywood may have been a macho town in the thirties, but The Aviator's leading women are every bit as shrewd and determined as the men. The winds of liberation blow through this film.

So does the hurricane of obsession. Scorsese is fascinated by reckless obsessives, roles Robert De Niro seems to have been born to play. Think of Johnny Boy Civello in Mean Streets (1973) or Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980) or Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1983)—with the twist that, for Pupkin, obsession turns out to be a good career move. Not for Howard Hughes. The only question in the long, last part of the film is whether Hughes will be done in by Trippe and his senatorial lackey, Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), or whether he will do himself in first. "I see things," Hughes tells Ava Gardner. "I know, baby," she says.

Why did Hughes go around the bend? Scorsese and Logan assign Hughes's germ phobia to his hygiene-obsessed mother, shown bathing young Howard in the film's opening and closing scenes. "You are not safe," she tells him. Hughes lathers up for the rest of his life. In his adolescence, Hughes lost both of his parents and most of his hearing. "People simply don't understand how deaf Howard was," Katharine Hepburn told A. Scott Berg. "It made him terribly detached and a real self-starter. But it also started him down an endlessly lonely path, really cut off from people." DiCaprio brings out Hughes's deafness in subtle ways. He maneuvers close to other characters, studying their faces for clues to the meanings of words he cannot hear. Deafness made it harder to cope with stress, of which Hughes had more than his share. Besides the relentless press attention, he was involved in several car and plane crashes, two of which are spectacularly re-created in the film. The cumulative damage to his body and brain ultimately left him dependent on narcotics. Anyone subjected to as much trauma as Hughes suffered would probably be seeing things too.

Scorsese uses every tool at his disposal, from lighting to sound editing to choice of film stock, to evoke Hughes's turbulent mental state. This is a technically brilliant and emotionally disturbing film, one in which director, writer, and star conspire to drag us along into the quicksand swamp of obsession. As the hero lines up sterile milk bottles filled with his amber urine, the film gains in psychological intensity but loses in historical interest. If the first hour is about the golden age of Hollywood and the second about the golden age of aviation, the third seems a self-conscious remake of Citizen Kane (1941), featuring Hughes as a cagier version of William Randolph Hearst. The particularities of history recede, the generalities of the human condition advance. The film ends on a universal, if homey, note. When you have your mental health, you have everything.