To deal with film is to deal with a historical game pretty much outside the control of historians.This book provides a broad historical and theoretical overview to the rapidly growing field of history and film. It introduces the varieties, types, and traditions of historical films made in Hollywood, Europe, and the rest of the world and the various and changing ways historians and other public critics (reviewers, teachers, politicians, historical actors) have greeted, evaluated, and debated the way particular historical events and history in have been presented on the screen.

Rosenstone argues that historical films utilize specific codes of conventions, visual, aural and dramatic, to engage us with and alter and complexify our view of the past. This allows film to create a sort of new history, one that we must approach with new conceptual tools if we are to evaluate its contribution to our understanding of the past.