Exchanging the Pen for the Camera

Abstract Does form affect the way people create meaning out of history? In 2023, the author—after a career as traditional text-bound scholar—undertook the project of making a documentary short. Cowboy Strikeexplores a labor conflict in late nineteenth-century Texas, but it also begot a collaboration with a contemporary songwriter. The process of filmmaking raised a series of dilemmas and opportunities for historical interpretation distinct from the traditional task of written scholarship. It generated new ideas about the power of collective memory, the role of mythmaking in historical understanding, and the malleability of time. These ideas, I suggest, were unlikely to have emerged from work on the same topic as a traditional scholarly article. The production of nonfiction film, therefore, offers scholars a powerful exercise through which they might rethink their subjects, and even the nature of the past itself.