Have you ever, while watching the movie Julie & Julia, drawn comparisons between Julia Child’s struggle to find the right publisher and the mercurial marketplace of academic publishing?
You probably haven’t. But historians have.
The comparison is one of many under the Twitter hashtag #HATM. The abbreviation stands for Historians At The Movies and was created by Jason Herbert, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities who now lives in Florida where he studies indigenous people and ecology.
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Have you ever, while watching the movie Julie & Julia, drawn comparisons between Julia Child’s struggle to find the right publisher and the mercurial marketplace of academic publishing?
You probably haven’t. But historians have.
The comparison is one of many under the Twitter hashtag #HATM. The abbreviation stands for Historians At The Movies and was created by Jason Herbert, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities who now lives in Florida where he studies indigenous people and ecology.
Jason Herbert, doctoral candidate, U. of Minnesota-Twin CitiesCourtesy of Jason Herbert
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Every Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, Herbert and other historians, plus people who just enjoy history, watch the same movie. They tweet along, sharing insight, tidbits, and punchlines. They prepared for the 2019 Oscars by watching Roma, a Best Picture nominee. On Sunday they’ll live-tweet the awards ceremony — which will be fun and a break from the norm, Herbert says.
Since the hashtag kicked off in July 2018, the weekly ritual has cultivated quite the following.
The Chronicle spoke with Herbert about what sparked the idea, how to forge scholarly camaraderie online, and why historians have a soft spot for Benjamin Franklin Gates, the historian/treasure hunter played by Nicolas Cage in the movie National Treasure.
Q. How did this idea come to you?
A. When I left Minnesota, I left behind a lot of my friends and colleagues who I saw on a day-to-day basis and would have these great conversations with. I needed to create a new network for myself where I could still be intellectually engaged with an academic community, even though I was physically removed. I got active on Twitter. I would talk to other historians. I had seen that National Treasure was going to be on Netflix. I just tweeted out, ‘We should all watch it.’ And someone said, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’
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The running gag with historians is that the archeologists get Harrison Ford, but historians get Nicholas Cage. You laugh at it, but we all kind of love National Treasure. So why not? It’ll be fun and silly and a nice way to blow off steam on a Sunday night in the middle of the summer. We had a lot of people engage. Joanne Freeman, who’s a professor at Yale, jumped in. She studies early America and she just died when she saw them putting lemon juice on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
Q. Why the obsession with and love of National Treasure?
A. We don’t have a lot of historians in movies. I know Ben Gates is not quite the professor type. But we get to see these questions about what happened in our ancient past, and how is America linked to all these other cultures? Yeah it’s zany. It’s over the top. It makes absolutely zero sense. But it’s fun.
Historians spend a lot of time deep in thought, thinking about really complex ideas. At the end of the day, it’s nice to sit down on the couch for two hours and have the night to yourself and relax. Even the writers of the film jumped on Twitter that very first weekend. They were like, ‘Don’t spare us. Hit us as hard as you can.’
Q. How do you choose the movies to watch?
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A. It’s got to be available on Netflix because it’s simple. I want to be able to mix up the focus of the films. I don’t want every film to be about a straight white man. Not that straight white men are bad, but I want to have female leads. I want to have people of color. I want to have not just American history but European history.
We can do a serious film, like we did with Mudbound, but it’s good to sandwich that with a light-hearted movie afterward. On occasion, I try to match the film with what’s going on in the world that week. When we watched Coco, we saw some very real parallels to the plot of that film to debates over immigration. Probably 80 percent of the films we’ve watched have come from people asking for them.
Q. How do historians engage with the movies? Is it a lot of jokes, or more relating their own research?
A. It’s a lot of both. On Twitter, historians are incredibly snarky, at times. It breaks down a lot of barriers between people, either for junior academics, like myself, or nonacademics and a scholar they follow. When we watched Free State of Jones, Victoria Bynum came on, and she had done a lot of scholarship that related to the film. She was able to relay what aspects of her work made it in, what she was really happy with or unsatisfied with. It pulled back the curtain.
A friend of mine, Daniel Gullotta, is a scholar of religious history. When we did some films around Halloween, like The Witch, he posted about witchcraft.
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The other thing to remember is demonic attacks, in the minds of the Puritans, would clearly come for them. If they were the best Christians, then naturally, Satan would want to harm them the most right? This adds to their holy paranoia like mad. #HATM
Someone posted some amazing stuff about the set pieces of L.A. Confidential a couple weeks ago. This is stuff you would never come across if you were just watching the movie.
Q. I’m interested in what you said about feeling isolated from those academic spaces when you moved. Can you talk about the importance of camaraderie and how Twitter fostered a space for that to happen?
A. The attitude toward social media, for junior scholars especially, has started to change. Tenured professors can advance notions without fear of retribution. A lot of junior scholars worry that they’re going to say the wrong thing. Am I going to represent myself the wrong way? It’s a real concern. I had that myself. Ultimately, I needed to create a network when I got down here. On Twitter, there were all these people that I could talk to — not only about history and indigenous Florida, but about movies, or sports, or turtles. (Last year, I saved a bunch of turtles, and I would post pictures of them.)
It changes the dynamic. It exposes you to a larger audience. I have had so many wonderful friends of mine who have become my friends via Twitter, via arguing over Coke vs. Pepsi. Especially for graduate students, it breaks down barriers. You go to a conference and there’s this esteemed professor of whatever. You don’t have to be afraid to go talk to this person because you’ve talked to them already.
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Twitter has allowed me to create a community of people I trust. It’s also allowed me to put my work in front of a larger audience. I tell my peers, who are graduate students, “Don’t be afraid to engage a large community. Do put yourself out there.”
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.