ABSTRACT
The cover of the April 1992 issue of the American Historical Review, professional journal of the American Historical Association, features a picture of Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner on the set of a Hollywood movie, JFK. The cover advertises three essays that approach history, the professional province of the AHR, through film, that were not refereed like all other submissions to the journal but solicited, and that, insofar as they address the film that occasioned them, are the product not of years of research and reflection but of weeks. 1 The dissolution of professional norms in the face of mass culture, the breakdown of the distinction between history and fiction—these trends that have caught up the American Historical Review—lie behind the two developments in American politics, one old and one new, that came together with the election of a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, as president of the United States: the conflation of politics and conspiracy, and the confusion between politics and the fiction-making visual media.
