Includes bibliographical references (pages 449-484) and index.

Prologue : facing the facts -- The world on a screen -- Reality under fire and projected Americanism -- Bijou safaries and truthful lies -- Rebels, government agents, and re-enactors -- War, peace, and propaganda, take two -- Fun facts, gawking mother nature, molding minds,and home-made history -- Small screens, big stories -- Zooming in -- For the people, by the people -- Three windows, one landscape -- Alternative takes -- 60 minutes, mock and mega truth, the multiverse, and life through the looking glass -- Getting real in a golden age -- Epilogue : virtual reality and then what?.

"Even with claims of a new 'post-truth' era, documentary filmmaking has experienced a golden age. Today, more nonfiction movies are made and widely viewed than ever before, illuminating and compounding our increasingly fraught relationship with what's true in politics and culture. How did this happen? Providing answers, Screening Reality is a widescreen view of the rarely examined relationship between nonfiction movies and American history--how 'reality' has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans"-- Provided by publisher.