Elementary and secondary school history students demonstrate a great deal of enthusiasm for making documentary films. With free and easy-to-use software, as well as vast online, archival resources containing images and sounds, students can sit at a computer and make serious and engaging documentary productions. With students affectively engaged by technology, imagery, and sound, teachers can leverage the power of graphics, music and cinema to support richer historical inquiry and interpretation. Teachers, moreover, can use desktop documentary making to help students efficiently understand history as a construction; documentaries combine images, sounds and special effects into a narrative representation of the past. In this article, the authors discuss the historical desktop documentary, how students make a desktop documentary, why teachers should have students make desktop documentaries, and how desktop documentaries can be successfully integrated into secondary school history classrooms. (Contains 1 figure and 9 notes.)