Beginning With Bonaparte

Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023) is a starting point for discussing this book's central claim that popular film is a cultural artifact that is actively shaping historical meaning. The film's emphasis on Napoleon's personality and his relationship with Josephine, rather than statecraft, prompts interviews with ten AP European History educators whose responses range from pragmatic acceptance to sharp rejection. A constructed narrative set at the AP Reading captures how teachers negotiate accuracy, story quality, student engagement, and exam alignment when deciding whether to screen, excerpt, or avoid a film. This chapter then situates classroom film use within three analytic lenses: Emplotment and metanarrative; cultural curriculum for historical thinking; and curricula and assessments as tools that authorize and assert dominant narratives. Together, these frameworks position cinema as both evidence and argument that are ripe for analysis within history classrooms.