By admin<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Today I attended a presentation in which senior history major Kate LeGrand talked about her central project for an upper-level history class. She explained that students wrote historical novels based on research they conducted in areas of interest. Kate chose to investigate the history of the CIA, particularly during the Truman administration and later during the Iran Crisis. She focused on the reasons that the growth of the CIA was stunted during its earlier years, emphasizing the conflict between the Office of Special Operations (OSO) and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), and the handicapping influence of their rivalry.<\/p>\n

I had the same first impression of the concept that Kate did when she first learned about the project\u2013writing a novel seems<\/em> easier than constructing a thesis or research paper, perhaps because there is no room for artistic license. However, then Kate explained difficulties that she encountered that made the process even harder than nonfiction writing. As an author trying to place her readers in the story, she had to pay diligent attention to details that a nonfiction researcher could have overlooked. For example, on top of investigating the OSO-OPC dispute, Kate had to familiarize herself with the setup of the CIA office (she was surprised to learn that cubicles were not popularly integrated into the office floor plan until the 1970’s).<\/p>\n

A history professor watching Kate’s presentation asked an interesting question that I thought relevant to the themes of our course. He pointed out that even when a historian doesn’t intend to write a work of fiction, the historical argument they create is itself a narrative constructed from an incomplete series of events, events which were recorded by people with biases and ulterior motives. He wanted to know what Kate thought was the value of presenting history with historically-accurate creative dialogue and characters that very likely<\/em> could have existed, rather than presenting what is \u201cknown\u201d to have happened in an engaging way. Kate responded that the use of dialogue and a plot engages people with the subject of history who might never pick up a nonfiction text on the same subject. The dialogue particularly connects readers with the characters, and makes the historical events more lifelike. This creative, alternative way of presenting history has effects similar to those of Google’s interactive doodles that Avery talks about in her blog post<\/a>. The historical novel and Google doodles both reach a broader demographic than those who would choose to research the pony express, or the history of the CIA.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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