I’ll never have the opportunity to home school, but if I had, there’s one innovation over my own education I would be determined to implement: making it easier to absorb history.
Education is a combination of learning how to think/question, and acquiring sufficient information to, um, furnish the foundations of the lifetime understanding you’re trying to foster. When you think about schoolchildren becoming adequately informed adults in their native culture (ignoring current events), the largest burden I think really has to be the corpus of Western civilization – what’s in the water we grow up to swim in.
The problem is, pedagogically, where to start and how to connect. If you begin with, say, Classical Greece, what sort of relevance would that have to a young student? How is it connected to, say, the French Republic? The Silk Road? The American experiment? How to you begin to build an understanding of influence by a mass of events and facts?
Fiction doesn’t necessarily have this problem. It creates its own world, demonstrates how the people in that world think and feel, how the rules work in their world, and where those rules came from and how they create both limits and opportunities.
The neophyte learns much more from reading, say, Ivanhoe and then a non-fiction account of the Middle Ages in England than vice versa, and I believe more of it will stick. The point is not to critique Scott’s accuracy but to give context and feel to the period and place. Then the next book, set in a different time/place can serve as an introduction to another nonfiction account. Given some thought, an entire multiyear curriculum for the 6th to 12th grades pairing a sequence of Western Civ (and other) periods/places with classic literature could make a self-reinforcing field of study.
This would have worked for me, what with Scott, Dumas, and dozens of others as fodder. I actually used Tolkien’s appendices this way in 9th grade as inspiration for diving into the (mythology and languages and) history of the North.
What do you think? Is this a fruitful way to teach both literature and history, synchronously? What pairings might you make?
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “History vs Story”
I think it’s an excellent way to teach it. It’s something my own elementary school teachers used for teaching us about US history in 4th-6th grades. We did North Dakota studies in 4th grade, and had to read one of the Laura Ingals Wilder <i>Little House On the Prairie</i> books before diving into the early history of ND (yes, I know those weren’t set in ND, but they were the next state over and representative of the times).
From my own experiences I’ve found that fictional works that I’ve read have led me to investigate the actual history/historical accounts surrounding events. Louis L’Amour’s <i>The Walking Drum</i> and Kim Stanley Robinson’s <i>Antarctica</i> got me to look into various part of the European middle ages and the Shackleton expedition.
Dunnett and Renault wrote the fiction that drew me into history in my teens, so I’ve often thought this, too. Naturally, I therefore think your idea is brilliant!
Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles and 16th Century English history.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Rifles, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin, a couple Georgette Heyers, and the Napoleonic Wars.
Kenneth Roberts’ Rabble in Arms and the American Revolution. (Also, the TV show Turn’s first couple of seasons, which were great).
Mary Renault’s books and ancient Greece.
I would tweak it to add non-classics, as is obvious from my list, because I found the classics themselves on the dry side when I was a kid. Frex, I’ve tried reading Ivanhoe as an adult and failed. The failing’s mine, but I’d want to make things easier.
Oh, I agree on “non-classics”, but remember I’m trying to advance both the knowledge of “literature” (in some form) & history teaching – it’s not just about making history easier. 🙂 (Might as well have two-fers.)
If it were me, I’d assign the more serious (“you ought to know this work to be educated” book as well as offer various entertainment works for extra credit, like the various “classical period detective” light series, or similar historical novels, like some of the above suggestions.) You can ease into the “classics” age-appropriately over several years (Kidnapped before Ivanhoe, for example).
I had to laugh… I bounced off the Dorothy Dunnett “Niccolo” books finding the hero far too scheming and instrumental to tolerate at my age.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to catch up to what Niccolo was up to, so I hear you. I loved the Lymond chronicles.
Now, I did like Kidnapped.
My fascination with history began when I was in (I think) third grade. My school library had a set of the “We Were There…” novels. Which I devoured.
The one I remember best was “at D-Day.” An english-speaking French teenager (the MC) approached some U.S. paratroopers and warned them of a German machinegun nest. The soldiers decided to take him along as an interpreter. He got quite an education.
I read a number of children’s books set in the War of Roses and their artistic license was bewildering until I learned that it started with a man named Henry deposing a king named Richard, and it ended with a different man named Henry deposing a different king named Richard.
This will sound odd but my biggest influence on wanting to read history as a youngster was reading the Ace Conans with the Frazetta covers. They had the Hyborian Age maps inside, and when my older brother told me that all those names were from real-world places I had to know more about them.
Sort of related to that?
It took me over a decade after I first read it to realize that Simon Tregarth, of Andre Norton’s Witch World, had been in espionage in WWII. And in the black market afterward.
I grant you that story doesn’t teach a lot of history, but it does give a powerful insight into what it was like to have gone through that war, survived despite everything, and found out there was no place for you in civilian life.
Here’s an off the wall deal. Dante’s _Divine Comedy_ and Ellis Peters doing Welsh history in _The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet_, written under her real name, Edith Pargeter. It’s actually incredible how many of the people fighting in England and Wales turn up in both Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, beginning with Pope Adrian who died when the ceiling fell on him.
You can do the first English civil war with Brother Cadfael but I’m not sure whether it would count as either history or literature. You’d learn a lot though…
Also, I happened to read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham at the same time as Longitude by Dava Sobel. The first is a kid book and the second isn’t really, but for interesting comparisons between Britain and the US and background for the War of 1812 they are good.
I think the strategy depends on the student?
IIRC, I didn’t read any historical fiction as a child – and precious little in days that I am sure of.
What got me going on history was my parent buying me a series of books (I don’t remember the title or publisher now) – heavily filled with maps. Wonderful, glorious, fascinating MAPS.
I HAD to know more about the events and people that caused all of those borders to ebb and flow.
Mom and Dad gave me lushly illustrated history/archaeology books about Troy, the Vikings, and the Inca. Then the Little House books, and Hollings. C. Hollings books Seabird and Tree in the Trail, Margurite Henry’s horse books that had history in them, all sorts of mythology and folklore titles, real history books about the states we were living in at the time, and other stuff. Plus I browsed their photo books about history and art. So I guess my answer is “yes.” Especially if it has beautiful illustrations.
I used the Story of the World series when they were little, which judging from the narrations I had the kids do were “Sumdood was king of a city, Sumoderdood killed Sumdood and was king.” Well, that’s actually the rough outline of an awful lot of history, but getting names attached to Sumdoods and Cities was a whole other problem.
Now, I think I’d try reading a bunch of history story books up until they were old enough to tackle books the size of Johnny Tremain, then making a timeline with all the characters on it. In some world where I had littles still. The baby is ten, however, and reads whatever she puts her mind to, so . . . she’s reading Understood Betsy and the Anne of Green Gables series right now. She’s a lot like me as a kid, scary thought!
I credit Johnny Tremain for my I interest in history.
Others to add to the pile: Falls the Shadow (Baron’s War) and The Sunne in Splendor (Wars of the Roses), both by Sharon Kay Penman. (Some of her stuff is great, some of it is meh.)
I guess I was kind of into history because I was exposed to historical artifacts early. (The parents claim I did some kind of tour guide act on our trip to Pompeii, even though I had no idea what I was talking about. Any video evidence is thankfully lost in the mists of time.)
Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales were really what enabled me to “get” the ambiguities of history. UT with the mutually exclusive backstories for the Elfstone (…”but which is true, only the Wise know”), and Silmarillion with fairly sympathetic elves like Maedhros and Maglor doing bad things, seemingly unsympathetic elves like Thingol occasionally doing good things (like fostering Turin), wise elves like Turgon blowing off the angelic warning he’s been expecting for centuries, etc. It is really is a basic starter guide to the idea that there are a lot of famous, gifted, influential people, important to the history of their world, who are really kind of a mixed bag, or whose foulups are simultaneously their own danged fault and motivated by events around them.
Actual historical fiction connected to famous events I tend to be kind of meh on. Death Comes as the End is a pretty good murder mystery and a solid look at “middle class” or “lower upper class” society in Middle Kingdom Egypt. A Civil Contract is a great sidelight on the homefront roundabout Waterloo, but alot of the character stuff is barely comprehensible to anyone under thirty except shy wallflower girls who can identify with the heroine. The Masqueraders is entertainingly wacky, but doesn’t really shed any light on the Jacobite Uprising that the lead characters are in trouble for having been involved in. I think there’s a couple of pretty okay time travel novels by John Dickson Carr.
The Scarlet Pimpernel series overall is pretty good entertainment if the reader can get into them, but the first two have definite “kissing book” vibes that boys aren’t always down with. Prescreen any adaptations before showing to children; the Leslie Howard/Merle Oberon version is kind of dull, the David Niven version is surprisingly awful, and I believe both the Anthony Andrews and Richard E. Grant versions have bedroom scenes. Pimpernel Smith is kind of interesting in that you could teach the books with the French Revolution, and this version a bit later with WWII, and see if the kids get the reference.
Pretty much any version of the Doctor Syn books are worth tracking down, as adventure stories with an English based sidelight on the aggressive taxes and government overreach leading up to the American Revolution. The movie/TV adaptations are all decent, if they cross your path, not so great as to be worth jumping through hoops for. Prescreen before showing to children.
By the time the kids are in high school, George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” series gives a lot of information about world events in the 1800s. It’s one of the few fiction series I’m aware of with footnotes (well, endnotes), and they’re useful! Although probably not suitable for pre-teens, the series could be a good introduction to a lot of historical subjects and events. And, of course, the first book is directly related to “Tom Brown’s School Days”, to give a tie to classical literature.
That is, if they can stomach Flashman
Anyone who can stomach the sort of characters presented as ‘heroes’ in modern YA fiction, at least the kind I’ve seen at Barnes & Noble, can handle Flashman. The scary part is he was designed as a very unlikable character but he looks good next to many of the YA ‘heroes’ I read about.
I can imagine a lower bar. Not much lower, though