Recognition of the Role Played by Documentaries in Teaching History

History is a great treasure of nations'' lives in the course of time. Nations try to، through keeping and transferring historical knowledge to the next generations، protect their own identities. The non-objective nature of history as well as temporal interruption between the past and the present، because of which historical events cannot be experienced by the present generation، make this difficult. In the modern educational systems، teaching history is not aimed to remembering a host of names، but to strengthening one''s power of analyzing historical events and studying their consequences for the contemporary lives of human societies. Thus، scholars have focused to find better ways to teach history and make a pathological study of the present methods of teaching history as one of the most important fields of humanities. One of the issues، emphasized in the modern education، is employment of various kinds of media to assist students to understand academic topics in a better way. In Iran، in teaching history، to this point has not been unfortunately paid so attention. Film is among instruments which are able to provide information and reconstruct the past in the audience''s mind. Among various kinds of film، documentaries، since they are relied upon facts and authentic resources، are among the best tools to teach history and represent the past events to the audience. Based on the theories popular in two fields of documentaries and modern education، the present article tries to recognize the place and importance of documentaries in teaching history. The present article is aimed to make an interdisciplinary study in two fields of history and arts، and puts emphasis on the point that making uses of movies produced on the basis of facts requires professors and tutors to find a primary knowledge of kinds of documentaries and their educational functions for social and political history of various countries.