History Documentaries to Watch as a Family

This BBC series is a docudrama rather than a straight documentary: actors in heavy prosthetic makeup, not computer animation, play our ancestors in reconstructed scenes, from Lucy, the famous upright ape, to modern humans. Robert Winston presents the British version; the US version uses narration by Alec Baldwin instead. Seeing the early species played by people is exactly what sets off the best questions about where we came from. Be ready for a few unsettling moments: Lucy dies in a fight over territory, a troop leader's death is kept mostly off screen, and the earlier species appear unclothed. Much of the behavior shown is educated guesswork, which is worth pointing out to older kids.

An Egyptian team opens an untouched tomb from the 25th century BC at Saqqara and works out who was buried there. Kids get the thrill of a real dig: narrow shafts, painted walls and scores of mummified animals, including a lion cub. Meeting everyone from the dig director to the foreman shows that archaeology is teamwork, not one hero with a whip. It is slow and runs close to two hours, with plenty of talk about evidence, so younger viewers may do better with it split over two evenings. Skeletons and mummies appear throughout.

David Macaulay, the illustrator behind the picture book Castle, visits real Welsh castles with co-host Sarah Bullen, while animated sequences show his imagined castle rising stone by stone. It dates from 1983 and looks it, but children who like building things tend to forget that once the drawings start moving. Macaulay wanted viewers to understand the castle as a weapon of war, so the story also covers the people who attack it. That makes it a natural next step for kids who have spent an afternoon designing their own fortress.

At about 40 minutes, this IMAX film is the shortest entry here and a smart choice for the youngest viewers. Jeff Bridges narrates as actors retrace the expedition to the Pacific and back, with river and mountain scenery made for the giant screen. Sacagawea and the Native Americans the party met are part of the story, which gives older kids an opening to ask whose land the journey crossed. The scariest moment is a bear chasing the men after a missed shot, and it is rated G in the US.

James Cameron goes back to the real Titanic wreck with actor Bill Paxton, and the cameras explore the ship inside as well as out. Kids who know the story from the 1997 movie get to see the actual rooms where it happened. Shot in 3D for IMAX, the theatrical version runs about an hour (a longer 90-minute cut came out on home video). It is rated G in the US and PG in the UK, so it suits the younger end of the range. The quiet, drifting views of a ship where nearly 1,500 people died carry the weight of the story without anything frightening on screen, and tend to bring the questions on their own.

Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition of the 1910s and the 2022 search that finally found his lost ship run side by side, so the film cuts between a survival story and a treasure hunt. That back-and-forth keeps the suspense high for older kids, and the moment the wreck appears on the sea floor is a genuine cheer. This one is for about ten and up. Archive footage shows illness and injury, a brief reenactment of a toe amputation ends on a shot of the severed toe, and the crew's killing of their dogs and cats for food is described. The BBFC rates it PG in the UK; it has no MPA rating in the US.

Middle schoolers in small-town Whitwell, Tennessee, set out to collect six million paper clips to grasp the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and ended up housing them in a real German railcar. Because the story is told through kids close to the viewers' own age, it is one of the gentlest ways to introduce the Holocaust to a ten-year-old. It is rated G in the US and avoids graphic detail, but the survivors' accounts are moving and some descriptions of what happened are upsetting. Expect questions afterward, which is the point.

In 1961, thirteen women pilots passed every physical test in a private astronaut screening program, and then NASA said no. Jerrie Cobb, Wally Funk and others tell the story themselves, alongside archive footage, photographs and radio broadcasts. There is nothing upsetting here beyond the unfairness itself, and that is exactly the conversation it starts: what would you do if you were told no because of who you are? Seven of the women went to Florida in 1995 to watch the first space shuttle piloted by a woman lift off, a fact worth saving for the end of that talk.

The moon landings told entirely by the astronauts who flew them, including Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Jim Lovell, with no narrator in between. Their humor and wonder land well with kids, and Aldrin's confession about what he did inside his spacesuit before stepping onto the moon gets guaranteed giggles. Rated PG in the US. It spends real time on the launch-pad fire that killed the Apollo 1 crew and includes news footage of combat in Vietnam and 1960s riots, so it fits nine and up better than the youngest viewers.

Built entirely from archive footage, much of it newly found large-format 65mm film, with no narrator and no interviews. The picture is so sharp that the 1969 mission plays like an event unfolding rather than a history lesson, and the crowds watching the launch are half the fun. Rated G in the US, with nothing iffy beyond a few cigarettes. The landing comes late and the build-up can feel slow to younger kids, so tell them it is worth the wait.

The Mars rover Opportunity landed in 2004 for a planned 90-day mission and kept exploring for almost 15 years. Angela Bassett's voice and animation by Industrial Light & Magic turn the robot into a character kids root for, while the engineers who drove it show what a life in science looks like. Rated PG in the US for some mild language. The film follows the mission to its end, when the rover shuts down for good, and that can hit kids who have grown attached to it harder than anything else on this list.