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Welcome to Period Piece, an archive of history as it's told on the silver screen! There is a lot to explore on the site, so we put together this guide to help you get started as quickly as possible. To begin with, we'll introduce you to the site's most quintessential feature, the timeline.

Navigating the timeline

Stretching from the dawn of human pre-history to the modern day, the timeline is the heart of Period Piece. Every single title in the collection is attached to one year or another along the timeline to which they are also assigned important attributes such as eras, time periods, and more. It is important to note that Period Piece organizes films and television by the year they depict, not the year they were made. Gladiator is cataloged to the year 180, Titanic at 1912, and Band of Brothers covers the span 1943-1945. Furthermore, since individual episodes of a series can vary wildly in what years and events they depict, every episode of a series is cataloged separately along the timeline. This means individual episodes carry their own year assignments, their own reviews, and their own historical attribute data.

As for how the timeline itself works:

The timeline starts showing a random selection of years proportioned across the site's different eras.

The Era Bar

Pre-History before 6,000 BCE Ancient World 6,000–500 BCE Classical World 500 BCE–400 CE Medieval Era 400–1500 Early Modern Era 1500–1750 Revolutionary Era 1750 – 1914 World Wars Era 1914 – 1945 Contemporary Era 1946 – present

The colors coded to each era are preserved around the site. If you see a colored ribbon next to a label or button, this is an indication of which era(s) are affiliated with that item.

The timeline is designed to work with arrow keys or clicks. Once you've selected an era, simply tap left or right to proceed along the timeline until you reach the end.

Using the search bar allows you to search for titles, years, time periods, historical people, and historical concepts or events (what we call "threads"). Simply search for what you're looking for and it will take you to the relevant place along the timeline. Note that searchable items such as time periods or historical people will also present additional links to pages with more information about those items.
Surprise Me takes you to a random year along the timeline. Use it to explore and find the next item on your watchlist!
Copy view automatically copies the site URL so that your currently selected timeline filters (e.g. All titles set during World War II that take place in China) can be shared easily.
Anything added to the archive in the last thirty days wears a New badge. Check back frequently to see new additions to the archive!

Filtering

Located just above the timeline search bar, filters let you narrow the timeline view according to your parameters, whether that be by time period, location, or general historical accuracy. It is important to note that filtering by a time period does not restrict the timeline view to just those titles specifically tagged with that time period, but any titles held within the period's year boundaries. This is to allow you to view titles representing concurrent events to your selected time period.

Pulling a Thread

9/11Abolition of SlaveryAmerican Civil Rights MovementApollo Program

9/11A set of hijacking-based suicide attacks carried out by the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda against various targets in the United States on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda operatives took control of several commercial airliners, ramming two into the Twin Towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The fourth aircraft crashed in an isolated area following an attempted seizure of control from the passengers.

Select a thread to open up its description and see which titles, historical figures, and locations are associated with it. Select multiple to enable statistical comparison of the titles associated with each thread. See the spread of ratings across every movie about D-Day or compare which is likely to have higher ratings, titles about the Apollo program or the Chernobyl disaster!

Historiography

The standard timeline is a representation of every historical title we could identify up to the present day. However, as this archive is a representation of how history has been interpreted by popular media over time, we also recognize the importance of being able to place oneself within the history of that interpretation itself. The Historiography tool lets you narrow the timeline's available titles to just those that were made by a certain year in time. Enable comparison with an earlier time to hold two standpoints in relative perspective (i.e. see what titles had been created between those two times). Within this view, you are also able to see important production statistics such as which directors and television networks produced titles by a certain year and which genres and languages were being represented.

Standing in 1984

Drag it back to 1984 and the timeline shows 32 of the archive’s 124 titles, everything that had been released by then. It currently runs from 1925 to 2026, and both ends move as the archive grows.

Use this tool to see what titles someone interested in watching media about history would have had access to by a certain year. Look for trends as the data evolves over time!

Saltiness and Historical Accuracy

You may have noticed around the site or in this guide various references to a concept called saltiness. Put simply, saltiness is our shorthand measure for a title's historical accuracy. When we evaluate a title, alongside our full review explaining our research findings, we also assign it a simple score from 1 to 5. Since we believe that every title, no matter how faithful to the historical record should be taken with at least a grain of salt, 1 represents our metric for the most historically accurate title possible. Every grain after that represents increasing amounts of liberties taken with the historical record until 5 which essentially represents little to no basis in reality whatsoever.

A title showing no grains at all is unrated, meaning we have yet to evaluate it for historical accuracy. Unrated titles are left out of site statistical measures. It is extremely important to also note that saltiness is not a measure of cinematic quality. There are many titles in the archive that are excellent films or series, but take generous liberties with the past. At the same time, there are also many titles with painstaking attention to historical detail that are just not particularly well received. We do not make judgments on title quality, which is why we draw in ratings from other film/television review sites (Letterboxd, Serializd, IMDB) to let you compare how a title's average rating can intersect with its historical accuracy. For more detail on our historical accuracy review process and metric explanation, see Explaining Saltiness.

Summary Pages

While the timeline is the centerpiece of Period Piece, it is not the only place to discover more from the archive.

Browse

Browse is a complete list of every title that exists in the archive, with various options for how to filter for what you're looking for. When you've found a combination of filters to narrow your search, you also have the option to generate a downloadable Watchlist. The Watchlist lays out your selection as a multi-element viewing plan, including relevant title information (language, threads, etc.) as well as associated reading should you wish to research the events the titles depict in greater detail.

Generate Watchlist163 items in the archive total, tallying each episode separately. Use the filters above to narrow the watchlist further.

Filmographies

Filmographies represents our way of showing not only how historical events have been depicted by cinema over the years, but even how specific historical people have been represented. Accordingly, when a title names some of its most notable featured historical people, each entry creates a page that gets recorded on the Filmographies page. We've included the same sort and filter options you may have seen on other summary pages as well as a few unique ones such as typecasting, or which historical figures seem to be attached to multiple time periods versus singular periods as well as life on screen, a measure of what percent of a historical person's life has been cinematically portrayed based on the years covered by titles they're attached to.

An important distinction to make is that historical figures on Period Piece are either referenced directly or serve as inspiration for a fictional proxy. Most figures are portrayed on screen. A few merely inspired fictional character(s), either by their historical role, characteristics, or manner. For example, Tokugawa Ieyasu is not in Shōgun (2024), but his historical role is neatly filled by the fictional Yoshii Toranaga. Historical inspirations are still counted for the purposes of tracking filmographies, but are noted where they appear.

If you explore a person's filmography, you will find all the titles they appear in, statistics about those titles, associated threads, genres, and occasionally some comparison of how they appeared visually onscreen over time.

Places

Alongside tracking which historical people are most often referenced by historical cinema, we also take a measure of which historical places get referenced. Places lets you see every historical location tagged to a title on the site in descending hierarchical form. Ultimately, history is extremely broad and resistant to generalized solutions, so we've tried to present the hierarchy of these places in as flexible a manner as possible. States or Regions can hold other States or Regions as well as Provinces which can, in turn, hold Cities. Above all are Grouped Places which are used as catchall buckets for any locations generally associated with its label, whether by geographic overlap, cultural identity, or other reason. Clicking on the arrow (if available) of a higher level location will reveal/hide the lower level locations filed under it. Clicking on the location itself will take you to a timeline view narrowed to just titles tagged with that specific location.

Cities often exist longer than the provinces or states that exist above them. Take a look and see how your favorite city has transcended the eras!

United Statesstate1776–present8 places inside
- Californiaprovince1850–present2 places inside
  - Berkeleycityc. 1866–present
  - Los Angelescity1781–present
- Hawaiiprovincefrom 1898
- Louisianaprovince1812–present1 place inside
  - New Orleanscity1718–present
- New Englandregion
- New Mexicoprovince1912–present
- Province of South Carolinaprovince1712–1776
- Virginia Colonyprovince1607–1776
- Washington D.C.city1790–present

Next to every location is a colored ribbon indicating which eras that location existed for.

Glossary

While we strive to follow historical conventions whenever possible, there are times when, for the sake of site usability or by design preference, we may deviate from these standards. For example, historians can agree on the existence of a "Medieval" period of history to group together related sets of events, but determining whether this period should be bound to the years 300-1500, 476-1453, or whatever other boundary is anything but definitive. Similarly, assigning all of human history a neat progression of eras, one after the other, is entirely a design consideration for the purpose of organizing groups of titles more than it is a representation of any scholarly consensus.
To that end, we include a site Glossary to make our definitions clear and provide context for our decisions. Additionally, the glossary is host to the site Book of Citations, a browseable list of every claim we've fact-checked and the source we cited across every review on the site.

Site Statistics

Statistics is an assessment of the archive as it exists at the present moment. It lists every included title, what eras they belong to, what directors have been featured, and much more. We expect, as the site grows and our documentation of history as depicted by film and television becomes more thorough, that the statistics shown here can be considered somewhat representative of cinema as a whole. Ultimately, however, we must also stress that any site statistics seen here are technically only representative of this site's collection and definitions. When we give a figure such as the "average total runtime" of the Medieval Period, we define it in terms of the titles we have identified and the Medieval boundary years we have set.

Regardless, we do also hope that the findings you may see here inspire new questions about how history is interpreted by popular media and the forms it takes. Why, for example, do certain parts of the world have their history explored more thoroughly than others? Why might the spread of ratings for titles from one era be less than those from another? And why are some historical figures frequently shown in media and others not?

Marginalia

In the world of Medieval manuscripts, marginalia were writings or illustrations placed along the margins of a larger work. These could be arguments against the text by a later reader, notes from the translator, or simply fun drawing exercises. For our purposes, Marginalia represent our editorial commentary. Whether it's a deeper dive into why we gave a title the score we did, some thoughts about the development of the site, or a reply to user feedback, we organize all our major commentary on the Marginalia page. Occasionally, you may also see small glosses (short marginalia comments) on site year pages or referenced by titles. These are usually clarifications about decisions that impact site content such as why certain titles are assigned to one year or another.

Giving Us Feedback

Though Period Piece is not an open editorial project like Wikipedia, we do welcome your assistance and feedback where possible. To start with, while we always give our best effort in conducting historical research, it is unavoidable that sometimes mistakes may creep in. To that end, every title review page has a submission box titled, "See something wrong or missing from this entry?" where we encourage you to submit your corrections. We do ask, though, for any new historical claims that you include one or more sources in your response that we can then verify.

Additionally, depending on if there is a review available or not, you are able to click "I Disagree with this score" or "Review this one next". Clicking either of these buttons will add to our internal tally, helping us more optimally close in on missing content or respond to disagreement with our methodology. Should any individual title receive enough disagreement, we will conduct a new review and either update the entry with a revision note or defend our conclusions with further explanation and research in Marginalia.

For any more extensive or general feedback, our contact page is always open.

The Bookmark

Should you ever wish to return to this page, the bookmark in the top-left corner is available wherever you are on the site with a link back here. It is also equipped with a handful of tools to quickly browse the site, from finding a random title in the archive to following a random historical thread. If you're looking for somewhere else to start, consider one or more of these cinematic anniversaries:

Proceed to the Timeline