Here’s my personal anecdote on that last item: During my senior year of college, I participated in a foreign study in England and Ireland through my university. While we were in Ireland, we focused on the troubled history of that country in the 20th century. The textbook on this topic we read before traveling was informative, but incredibly dry. Watching the 1996 Liam Neeson movie Michael Collins, a biopic about one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, helped provide a narrative for one thread of the topic. Actually visiting the locations described in the textbook and dramatized in the movie made the stories and information more concrete for me, and hearing from various Irish experts while we were there helped me connect the history we had studied to the current political state of the country. Any one of these modalities would have been insufficient for me to get a handle on the 20th century history of Ireland (particularly that textbook!), but their combination was incredibly effective.