#HATM: Historians at the Movies Builds a Community, One Film at a Time

[Nevilledog]

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Alexandra Levy
@AlexandraFL21
For #AHAPerspectives, I wrote about the #HATM phenomenon: how @HerbertHistory created it and has grown the community for over three years now, and the many people (historians and nonhistorians alike) who have benefited from HATM in various ways.

#HATM: Historians at the Movies Builds a Community, One Film at a Time
Historians at the Movies, a social media watch party, has connected historians every Sunday night since 2018.
historians.org
9:06 AM · Oct 19, 2021

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2021/hatm-historians-at-the-movies-builds-a-community-one-film-at-a-time

It all started with Nicolas Cage.

In July 2018, Jason Herbert, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Minnesota, wanted to watch the 2004 film National Treasure with some friends—online. He tweeted from his account @HerbertHistory, “National Treasure is on Netflix again. I feel like we as historians owe it to America to jointly watch this film and live tweet it together.”

You don’t have to wait in line for a ticket at HATM. Just press play at 8:00 p.m. ET every Sunday and follow along with the hashtag on Twitter. Russell Lee/Library of Congress, 2017789014. Public domain

Little did Herbert know that this tweet would start a phenomenon. To make it easy for the historians tweeting along while watching National Treasure, Herbert created the hashtag #HATM, short for “Historians at the Movies.” At the appointed time, historians tuned in to watch Cage steal the Declaration of Independence while laughing at and bemoaning the movie’s antics together on Twitter. As Joanne Freeman (Yale Univ.) put it at the time, “THEY PUT FRICKIN’ LEMON JUICE ON THE DOI.”

The HATM community had so much fun that July evening that they asked Herbert to continue selecting films and gathering historians to live-tweet from their couches. The next week, historians tuned in for Lincoln. Then Marie Antoinette. Then Trading Places. With that, Herbert told Perspectives, “we were off to the races.”

*snip*