Fiction and History

Category: From the historians

  • Price’s Lost Campaign grapples with fiction in the historical record

    1864 raid into Missouri rightly remains a brutal enigma in Mark Lause’s Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri Even as General Sterling Price’s fall 1864 campaign deep into Missouri proceeded, its participants and victims shifted their conception of it so rapidly as to push the fog of war into a realm of nightmarish…

  • What I did say at Voices of Conflict: From Battlefields to Springfield and Beyond

    Voices of Conflict: The American Civil War from Steven B Yates on Vimeo. Brentwood Public Library, Monday, April 18: Steve Yates, Dr. William Garrett Piston, and Dr. Randall Fuller talk about the genesis of their books. This vimeo link at http://www.vimeo.com/22632952 will take you to the full lecture and Q&A from Monday night.

  • Blogger, meet blogger; you both have a blog in common!

    And a blog to blog about…. One of the heady pleasures of having a book published and marketing that book has been meeting the minds of others. I say minds because on the internet, in the blogosphere, you don’t get that old fashioned introduction, that face-to-face trust. You catch just a semaphore, a Morse code…

  • More on the miracle of readers

    At the Eudora Welty Symposium, Tommy Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Smonk, Hell at the Breach, Poachers) said that it was a leap of faith to write a book, and an even greater leap of faith that anyone would ever read what you had made up. Perhaps the greatest leap of faith is that a…

  • Who are we writing about? The challenge of Gulliver’s dilemma

    Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels poses several upendings of size to point out human fallacies of perspective. The Lilliputians, five to six inches high, see Lemuel Gulliver as a “Man Mountain” and find his outsized complexion and the quantities of food he consumes to be grotesque. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is tiny and finds the giants who…

  • The hope of justice and the sorrow of lists

    Michael Fellman’s Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War is a book one finishes and never forgets. Unassailably, artfully, humanely this is how great historians write. But for the native Missourian, his is a hard book to read. His concepts of psychic numbness, survival lying, and the unwinding of all…

  • Satan’s dangerous fiction, or Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be bogomils

    A Concise History of Bulgaria, Second Edition by R. J. Crampton (Cambridge University Press) yields us some thoughts on fiction from an intriguing and, as Crampton labels them, heretical group of Christians called the bogomils. All this below is a riff on material from his chapter on Mediaeval Bulgaria. When I quote, it’s from Crampton…

  • History makes fiction of history

    Christopher Phillips’s book, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of the Southern Identity in the Border West, makes many very interesting points about how much of history involves personally or familialy adopted story. Contemporary Missourians who “celebrate their Southern heritage , whether through family genealogy, as Confederate reenactors, or by touring the state’s…

  • A little knowledge rocks

    It is true that where an engineer, contractor or miner works all his life in one locality he becomes so expert in his knowledge of the methods and costs of rock excavation that he sees little practical value to himself in a knowledge of minerals, rocks or geologic principles. But when, possibly late in life,…

  • The historian, the fiction writer, and the uncorroborated airship

    Promoting the books of historians at University of Arkansas Press was one of the great pleasures of working there. Working with colleagues trained in history was an even greater pleasure. Kevin Brock, then the acquisitions editor, pointed out the passage below. We both latched onto it with glee, but with very different reactions. This is…