History seems a rather divisive subject: it either absorbs or bores you. For me it generally depends on the era and who's teaching it. Reading from a textbook can get rather mundane, but I've found through art, history can be really turned on its head to tell us something even about our own times. Come with me now, and I'll try to briefly emphasize what I mean.
Firstly, theatre. Now, I must admit besides The Tempest for uni I have never read Shakespeare, but plays about Julius Caesar et cetera clearly did something in their own time, being part of the global canon as they are now. Then and ever since, painting has done likewise. Sidney Nolan lived nearly a century after Ned Kelly, but now the bushranger and Nolan's striking portraits of him are synonymous. Back to literature, in 1987 Toni Morrison brought post-Civil War African American struggles roaring back to life in her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Beloved, and later Tracy Chevalier turned Johannes Vermeer's painting Girl with a Pearl Earring into an international bestseller; both of these later spawned movie adaptations.
Which brings me to the focal point of this entry: cinema. Historical revisionism there goes right back to The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and then, of course, 1939's Gone with the Wind (with Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel also fitting the last category, naturally). Now, even as a 28-year-old male I have something of a Disney fetish, but dig down into the Vault (pun intended) and you'll find some very questionable revisionist history. The worst of all is 1949's Song of the South, with a depiction of black slavery that makes Gone with the Wind look like a pro-NAACP documentary. But to their credit they've recently cleaned their act up with films like the magical Big Hero 6 (2014), set in San Fransokyo, a futuristic fusion of San Francisco and Tokyo, and The Princess and the Frog (2010), an all-Black modernisation of the fairy tale The Frog Prince. Then there are masterpieces like the Best Picture Oscar winners Forrest Gump (1994), in which the protagonist falls into significant cultural events like cars into potholes, and Amadeus (1984), a deliberately anachronistic portrayal of the relationship between Mozart and "rival" composer Antonio Salieri (and remember, these two were respectively based on a novel and play). Then there's Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which uses a setting in German-occupied France to examine this article's exact theme, and how art can be used to create social change.
Looking beyond Hollywood now, The Piano (1993) is a breathtaking romance set in a rather Gothic-feeling colonial-era New Zealand, Akira Kurosawa's films and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) all ladle (mostly) original stories over settings in feudal Japan and China respectively, and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), for me the best of all anime films (and yes, that includes Miyazaki's works), is a devastating depiction of Japan at the end of World War II told from the perspective of two orphaned children. Not to be outdone, Europe has contributed marvelously here, like with Life Is Beautiful (1997) in which a Jewish Italian waiter tries to preserve his son's innocence through humour and imagination in a Nazi concentration camp, and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), a beautiful dramedy about communist East German family life after the Wall fell.
Popular music is also rich with examples, like Stevie Wonder's Black Man, a multi-racial American race relations tapestry, and Billy Joel's Cold War-themed We Didn't Start the Fire. History: it mightn't always be pleasant. But pair it with art, and that combo can be very helpful and useful.
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