I feel like a lot of times documentaries aren’t always accurate scientifically or historically (extreme example being discovery channel ‘documentary’ on mermaids). What’s a good way of checking whether a documentary is actually historically accurate and not wildly lying to me?
This is a great question, and one that I can actually talk about from my own personal experience because it directly impacted the rest of my life. While it starts out as anecdotal, I will use this as an example into how you can fact check historical documentaries.
In August 2010, I was in the Army and had just come back from Iraq and was on leave, so I had a bunch of time on my hands. I started watching random documentaries and somehow stumbled upon one called The Revolution that was created by the History Channel. It's a 13-episode show that spanned from the 1760s to 1800 in North America. I blew through the series in a day or two and loved every second. Part of what really drew me in was that there was a ton of information presented by the historians in it that I never heard before because American High Schools mainly teach a mythological version of this history that exemplifies America as the heroes. Examples of new things I learned were:
So after it was over, I found myself asking, "is all this true?" I wasn't a historian, so I didn't know how to find this stuff out. So I reached out to an old professor of mine (I had dropped out of college years earlier) and asked him, 'how do you vet a documentary like this?' He immediately asked me if historians were in the documentary (there were) then he told me to read some of their books. A historian who was featured in the series named Bruce Chadwick had written a book that the documentary referenced so I ordered it (George Washington's War). The book was amazing and captivating. (This was also a year before I went back to school to become a historian and 6 years before I choose the Revolutionary period in Grad School for my speciality). The book outlined so much info that I had no idea about, especially on Washington's life. I then used this as a jumping off point since I realized that it was helpful to see Chadwick's work in book form, but I wanted to see if other historians or writers agreed with him. So I went to Barns & Nobel and bought another book on Washington's Army and was again really surprised by what I saw.
While I didn't fully realize it at the time, what I was doing was cross checking my secondary source by finding out what the historians in the film actually said themselves (and not simply what the film makers wanted them to have said) but also checked to see if the film linked up with what other historians were saying about the same period.
Similarly, this is the best way for anyone to vet a documentary. Find what historians in the documentary are saying for themselves and then cross check it with other historians not featured in the film. This can be done across disciplines and can be super helpful.