ROBERT ROSENSTONE WRITES PERCEPTIVELY ABOUT HIS UNIQUE EXPERIENCE in filmland. His experience is unique, or nearly so, because few historical scholars have had the opportunity to work in both documentary and feature film production, or in either of them, for that matter. I disagree with none of Rosenstone's observations and will confine my remarks to emphasizing that such reflections of historian filmmakers are of real importance to the larger community of scholars, who must recognize the relevance of film and television study to their work as professional historians. While the number of historians who work in film or television production will always be small, the lessons they can teach their colleagues are important in two ways. First, they can help anyone involved in the research and writing of modern history to think about the contributions visual evidence can make to their understanding of the past. It has now been 150 years since the invention of photography, a hundred years since the invention of motion pictures, and fifty years since the invention of television. In politics, diplomacy, and an ever expanding number of research areas, questions arise in which ignoring the visual evidence is an injustice to the subject. Three recent books, for example, one of them a Bancroft prize winner, focus on questions of governmental policy and public perception of issues related to the dust bowl of the Great Plains in the 1930s. But none of them gives adequate attention to what may have been the most important effort of the government to influence public perception on the question. The Resettlement Administration's 1936 film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, was planned to be the first government-produced documentary to have a wide distribution in commercial theaters. Although hopes for the production were not completely fulfilled, an agency administrator observed that the film had been screened in more than 3,000 of the approximately 14,000 theaters in the United States before it was withdrawn from circulation in the midst of political controversy in 1940.' The best of the three books, Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern