In the meantime, I am thrilled to announce the publication of the latest issue of Rethinking History, with a forum built around Aaron Sachs‘s essay “Letters to a tenured historian: imagining history as creative nonfiction – or maybe even poetry.”

My Writing of History course had the privilege of reading Sachs’s letters in an advance copy–quite advanced, given that the cover note suggests that the letters are recovered in 2049, “after the most recent round of earthquakes, mudslides, and fires, when Southern California was finally abandoned.” The curators of the future wonder, “Who would write such fake epistles, and footnote them, to boot?” Readers of the present will be richly rewarded if they find out.

Rethinking History has gathered more letters in response: a note of introduction from James Goodman, and reactions and reflections from Jenny Price, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Martha Hodes, Robert Rosenstone, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Kate Brown, and Gregory Downs. My print copy is in the mail (one might find a great deal right now for AHA members, if you would like one) and I don’t have complete access online, but the abstracts suggest this is a roundtable on the state of writing history creatively (and writing about history creatively) not to be missed.

The Promise and Pitfalls of Writing for Readers beyond the Academy
Friday, January 2, 2009: 3:30 PM-5:30 PM
Nassau Suite B (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Martha Hodes, New York University
Commentators:
Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly and Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
Deborah E. Harkness (The Jewel House), University of Southern California
Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route), Columbia University
Stephen A. Mihm (A Nation of Counterfeiters), University of Georgia

The Pleasures of the Imagination
Friday, January 2, 2009: 8:30 PM-10:30 PM
Trianon Ballroom (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Gabrielle Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University
Panelists:
Linda Colley, Princeton University
Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
John Demos, Yale University
Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University
Jill Lepore, Harvard University
Robert A. Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology
Jonathan D. Spence, Yale University

Oh….and grad students might want to check out the panel session where I’m speaking, too.

Martha mentions some books that she recommends as inspiration for writing:

Erskine Clark, Dwelling Place
Clare Messud, The Emperor’s Children
Stephen Carter, New England White
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Some questions for discussion:

• Martha says that she finds much of her writing inspiration from fiction. Do you find inspiration from fiction? If so, what books would you recommend to other writers?

• When conducting your own research, do you find yourself looking for good stories to tell?

• She notes that in The Sea Captain’s Wife she leaves out the sentence that says “I argue that…” because she feels that the argument is evident from the historical narrative. Do you, in your own writing, find the need to explicitly spell out your argument for your readers or do you find that you can write in a manner that makes the argument obvious?

In this episode Martha discusses her undergraduate class in “Experimental History.” This previous post links to her Perspectives article on this topic and offers links to the books and articles that she uses in the classroom.

Following her reading, Martha discusses various stylistic choices she made in writing the narrative of Eunice’s life. Of particular interest are her thoughts about telling a “true” story.

Some questions for discussion:

• What part of this reading resonates most strongly with you?
• How do you feel about Martha’s discussion of the choices she made in quoting from Eunice’s letters?
• In what ways does telling the story of a remarkable figure like Eunice–a woman who married across the color line– help us to better understand the lives of other women in the nineteenth century?
• Will Martha’s example impact your own history writing? If so, how?

Note: click here to listen to this episode of Making History Podcast or subscribe to the feed for MH podcast.
Next Monday Part 2 of this podcast will be posted. Stay Tuned!

I’ve been reading through each text that she mentions in her article, and have compiled a list below (with hyperlinks when possible) for others who are interested in reading more works of Experimental History:

Books:

John Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive
William S. McFeely’s Sapelo’s People
David Farber’s Chicago ’68
Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale
James Goodman’s Blackout
Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia
Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter
David Dante Troutt’s The Monkey Suit
Daniel K. Richter’s Facing East From Indian Country
Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties
Richard White’s Remembering Ahanagran
Shahid Amin’s Event, Metaphor, Memory
Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces
Richard Price’s Equatoria
Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage
Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page
John Clive’s Not By Fact Alone

Journal Articles:

Carl Becker’s “Everyman is His Own Historian”
John Clive’s “The Most Disgusting of Pronouns”
Daphne Patai’s “Sick and Tired of Scholars’ Nouveau Solipsism”
Ruth Behar’s “Dare We Say ‘I’? Bringing the Personal into Scholarship”
Elsa Barkley Brown’s “Polyrhythms and Improvization: Lessons for Women’s History”
Brook Thomas’ “Ineluctable though Uneven: On Experimental Historical Narratives”
Greg Dening’s “Performing on the Beaches of the Mind”
Suzanne Lebsock’s: “Truth or Dare: On History and Fiction”

Films:

American Experience: A Midwife’s Tale
American Experience: A Murder at Harvard