PERSPECTIVE ON HISTORY : TV Can Be a Teacher When It Gets It Right : The docudrama ‘When Lions Roared’ faithfully reflected the record for a nation largely ignorant of the past.

Thirty-five years of teaching U.S. history in major American universities has taught me that bright undergraduates, like most people in the country, don’t know a lot of history. “What’s this thing called the New Deal you keep referring to?” a genuinely interested student asked me a few years ago.

A national survey of 17- and 18-year-olds in the late 1980s showed that my student wasn’t the only historically illiterate youngster on high school and college campuses. Forty percent of the sample didn’t know what U.S. war had involved the issue of states’ rights; 43% had no idea which side Russia had fought on in World War II; 45% couldn’t identify Joseph Stalin’s nationality; only 40% knew what NATO is, and an undisclosed number thought that Mexico and Canada were the last two states admitted to the Union.

This knowledge gap surely has something to do with the emphasis on race and gender rather than more traditional subjects in history courses. It is also the result of “popular” history, articles and books more concerned with sensational revelations than faithful reconstructions of the complexities that beset human affairs.

Television, the medium through which most people continue to learn some history after their mandatory school courses, is a less than perfect way to educate Americans. PBS documentaries like “The Civil War” and “LBJ,” one of several biographies sponsored by the American Experience, reach the 10% of the country already interested in and knowledgeable about the national experience.

As for the other 225 million Americans, they learn or relearn the country’s past from docudramas, dramatizations of historical events and portrayals of famous personalities more intent on entertaining than informing. Most of these films reveal the producers’ unspoken assumption that history is of small value alongside the need for a riveting story, however reductionist and distorted in the service of “reaching an audience.”

What then are we to make of “World War II: When Lions Roared,” a two-part documentary with actors--Ed Begley Jr., Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, John Lithgow and Jan Triska--who are better known to the public now than the likes of Harry Hopkins and Vyacheslav M. Molotov? Cordell Hull, the longest-serving U.S. secretary of state, is so obscure a figure that he goes unmentioned in the film. But why should Hull have any part in a drama about World War II that includes nothing about Chiang Kai-shek or Charles de Gaulle or George Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower or the domestic struggle with the isolationists or the argument over whether Pearl Harbor genuinely surprised F.D.R. or the decision to build an atomic bomb or the tensions over industrial mobilization or the Holocaust or the incarceration of Japanese Americans?

It is easy to poke fun at “When Lions Roared.” Hoskins, Caine and Lithgow are “trapped in impersonations that come perilously close to a not-very-inspired sketch on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” the New York Times critic complained.

But whatever the film’s limitations, it has some large virtues. It offers a healthy dose of historical realism--about the wartime conflicts between Britain, Soviet Russia and the United States, and the burdens of leadership shouldered by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. David Rintels, the writer and producer, effectively captures Stalin’s depression and immobilization immediately after Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June, 1941. He accurately presents Churchill’s determined efforts to draw Roosevelt and the United States into the fighting. And he clearly describes F.D.R.’s receptivity to joining the struggle against Hitler’s assault on the Four Freedoms and civilized standards of behavior.

To his credit, Rintels has meticulously built his docudrama on the correspondence and conversations between the five leaders portrayed in the film. Their words faithfully reflect what they wrote and said to each other and demonstrate the contest of wills between the Big Three for what they believed would advance not only their mutual struggle against the Axis powers but also the postwar well-being of their respective nations. Rintels’ Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, for all the makeup and contrived accents, come close to the real men now revealed in the rich historical record.

“When Lions Roared” probably does more to inform most Americans about aspects of that great struggle than anything else they are likely to read, hear and see in their lifetimes. I wish the film had done more. But as someone who passionately believes in the value of putting as much historical realism as possible before the mass of Americans, I am grateful to the film’s producers for a job well done.