Tides of History · Audible / Patrick Wyman

Doing History through Movies: Interview with Dr. Jason Herbert

December 4, 2025·48 min·4 clips

Band of Brothers depicts American soldiers committing war crimes — and the tonal gap between it and The Pacific maps exactly onto American cultural confidence before and after 9-11.

Movies came first. Patrick Wyman opens with a plain confession: before Latin, coursework, archaeological sites, or primary sources, films had already taught him what the past felt like. Those impressions stuck. They sit beside the books, places, and historians, which makes Jason Herbert a natural guest. Herbert has a PhD in American history from the University of Minnesota, works as a tribal liaison for the U.S. Forest Service, and hosts Historians at the Movies. The conversation has room to wander. Patrick and Jason are not grading films on a neat accuracy checklist. They are asking how movies make the past feel lived in. Dirty Dancing gets the close read. Jason calls it a sneaky history film, not because it has famous leaders or battles, but because it catches a whole social world. Jewish summer vacations in upstate New York, music, class, and abortion all carry historical weight. Nostalgia gets a little less tidy too. A movie remembered from childhood can later show meanings the younger viewer missed. Jason brings in the 1980s AIDS context, including the note that the director later died of the disease. Then the episode veers, happily, into 13 Days, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bruce Greenwood, underrated character actors, and some affectionate mockery of The Core. The detour is part of the point. This is about how movie pleasure, historical judgment, and half-remembered feeling can all live in the same conversation.

As heard by us

Movies as history and memory, not just entertainment.

Patrick Wyman starts from a familiar idea: movies such as Glory, Braveheart, and Dances with Wolves can make history feel real before a reader ever gets to the books. With Dr.

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If movies taught you history before textbooks did, this is your lane.

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