In recent years, academic historians have begun to direct their attention to an important part of popular culture: video games. Although historians have examined films, tv shows, and novels for years, they have been slower to engage critically with video games, even though historical video games have now become a billion-dollar industry.

This panel will feature presentations on the theme of how historians can engage with video games. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall will examine Blackhaven--part of a new trend in which professional historians (sometimes collaborating with students) help to produce historically accurate and sophisticated games. In Blackhaven, she notes, an academic historian at the University of Connecticut has partnered with his own students and with communications students at Xavier University in New Orleans (an HBCU) to produce a game dealing with American slavery. Joshua Fitzgerald will examine a series of video games related to the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica—some designed for entertainment and some for the classroom. He notes that some games, based in primary sources and ethnography from the region, can help students understand contingency, complexity, and multiperspectivity, while others erase indigenous history and reproduce the biases of 16^th-century Spanish sources. Finally, Thomas Lecaque looks at the 2007 game Empire: Total War, examining the way that players enter a simulated 18^th-century world. This game, he argues, strips indigenous groups in the Americas of their agency and power while reproducing settler-colonial logics.

This panel, in short, will appeal to historians interested in how pop culture shapes American understandings of the past, with particular attention to video games’ portrayal of indigenous peoples and other underrepresented groups.