ABSTRACT
Historians who dismiss cinematic history as abnegating its responsibility to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth often act as if their own work is devoted to presenting just the facts, even though history is defined by its critical distance from those facts. Because Rosenstone and later theorists have demonstrated so effectively the extent to which historians in general have adopted the generic norms Toplin has reserved for cinematic history, this chapter emphasizes the very last of these norms, which is clearly applicable to filmed history alone: "Cinematic history often communicates as powerfully in images and sounds as in words". The historians whom White and Pegler-Gordon describe continue to call books that include illustrations written histories rather than verbal/visual histories, because the latter description would undermine historians' sense of their own primacy by placing verbal and visual signifiers on an equal footing.
