ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case of Chicago teacher Ms. Williams and her unit on the Cold War using the foreign film The Lives of Others in her world history classes. History teachers who use film in the classroom should use a range of movies, including those students might judge to be alien or foreign. This needs no special justification, since movie texts are a ubiquitous form of historical "documents" that students around the world often encounter outside school. Teachers use a number of criteria in selecting movies for their classrooms, including content requirements, disciplinary knowledge, and local standards. In The Past Is a Foreign Country, historian David Lowenthal maintained that the past is not simply a sepia-toned version of the present, with historical peoples thinking and acting more or less as we moderns would under the same circumstances. Finally, this chapter also provides an overview of this book.
