Blurring the Lines Between Fact and Fiction: Can Historical Fiction be Unethical?

If you've read my previous post on historical fiction, you know that I've long been a fan of the genre. Well, I may be more than a decade older now, but my taste in literature for pleasure reading has remained largely the same; I still read almost anything in the genre that I can get my hands on.

For example, I most recently completed Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a novel about slavery, identity, power and self-determination in the early nineteenth century and found it a thoroughly enjoyable read right from the first page. Overall, I found Hill’s prose powerfully written and his main character both sympathetic and inspiring. I would strongly recommend this book to any lover of good fiction, historical or otherwise.

With Book of Negroes finished, my current novel of choice is Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us. On its most basic level, the book is about the lives of two women, a mother and a daughter, their relationship with one another, and the experiences which have shaped the way that they each view and interact with the world and each other. The narrative of the story bounces between the perspective of Anna, as a young Aryan girl living in Germany during the Second World War, and the present-day United States where her daughter, Trudy, is a professor of German History at an unnamed university somewhere in Minnesota.

The book’s dust jacket hails the novel as “a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame,” a summary which I think is actually pretty accurate thus far (I’m only about half-way finished the book at this point). So far, I’m finding the plot engaging and the characters complicated and flawed enough to be interesting. I certainly look forward to reading each new chapter.

That said, I think that I would have been better off not reading the blurb about the author at the back of the novel before finishing the book. Blum’s author bio states “Jenna Blum is of German and Jewish decent. She worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and runs fiction workshops for Grub Street Writers.” That’s it, just three run-of-the-mill sentences that pack a lot of punch. In fact, these seemingly innocent details about Ms. Blum’s background are enough to make me, as a student of history, more than a little uneasy.

I’m sure that the details about her heritage were strategically included to legitimize her role as a storyteller whose work focuses on Second World War Era Germany and German history and culture more generally. Some of the issues dealt with by the characters in this book are of a sensitive nature and it’s understandable that the publisher would have wanted to underline Blum’s “authentic” voice as much as possible so that the readers would have confidence in Blum’s ability to speak for her characters. That’s fine. That’s not the part I find disturbing.

What does get under my skin is the fact that Ms. Blum worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years before writing this book. This experience, combined with mentioning her current teaching position at Boston University, were undoubtedly her publisher’s way of placing Ms. Blum within academia, a position which many may perceive as giving her more “authority” over the historical aspects of the novel than the majority of the public reading it. A good thought, but Ms. Blum’s association with the Shoah Foundation ultimately leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Fair or not, I find myself wondering exactly when Ms. Blum began conceptualizing her novel and how/if she went about conducting background research for it. For instance, I can’t help but wonder how many of the details of her interviews with Holocaust survivors made it into this novel either consciously or unconsciously. Or, if these survivors had any inkling when they took part in interviews with Ms. Blum how some of their most painful memories might be used beyond the agreed upon Shoah Foundation oral history projects.

Like I said above, it might not be fair of me to question Ms. Blum’s integrity like this without any concrete evidence, but I feel I that have to acknowledge at least the possibility for the exploitation of Holocaust survivors to occur when an historian’s academic work is also reflected in their works of fiction. It all seems just a little unethical to me.

Too Rich For My Blood

In September 2009, our Public History class was introduced to Adam Crymble of NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Eve Duchesne of EcoKids and the major group project that we would be working on over the course of the upcoming year: that is, conceptualizing, researching, planning and completing several environmental history lesson plans which would be compliant with the Ontario elementary school curriculum and fit for online display in the teacher's section of the EcoKids website. The idea was to create engaging, informative, interactive and historically nuanced lessons plans that took into consideration both multiple intelligences and different learning styles.

For our part of the project, Shelagh Staunton, Tim O'Grady and I chose to focus our efforts on creating a lesson plan about Samuel de Champlain's contact with the Hurons for the 6th grade Social Science unit on First Nation Peoples and Early European Explorers. It has taken us seven months of blood, sweat and tears, but I think the end result is that our group has put together a pedagogically sound lesson plan for teachers which is engaging for students and accomplishes the stated goals of both of our clients.

But, with just over two weeks until the final project deadline, our group is struggling to put together the copyright permissions for the images that we need to supplement the written materials of our lesson plan. Our difficulties with this aspect of the project are two-fold: 1) since the copyrights for our desired visual materials are held by third-party cultural institutions we are at the mercy of their schedules (which is not nearly as pressing as ours, it seems) and 2) some of the best images are prohibitively expensive and we're being forced to seek cheaper and somewhat less authentic alternatives, a solution we feel has the potential to compromise the integrity of our end project.

Although difficulty #1 is frustrating, it's also understandable - archives and museums are busy, chronically understaffed institutions which likely have more pressing in-house concerns to attend to than completing our image requests. Difficulty #2, however, is another matter entirely.

In order to give our students as much exposure to primary sources as possible, we decided to utilize a large number of photographs of Huron artifacts from the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Unfortunately, when it came time to get copyright permissions for these items we hit a rather large brick wall: the price of purchasing the permission to show a single image that had already been digitized on a website was $50/yr (or $200 for 5 years). That's INSANE! Since our group originally wanted to use 6 or 7 photographs from the Museum on the EcoKids website indefinitely, that meant that our copyright costs were going to be upwards of $1500 for the first five years alone! That's highway robbery!

Because EcoKids is a not-for-profit organization and we are intending to use the materials for educational purposes, our group approached the Museum of Civilization again a few weeks ago, explaining the situation to them and received a second quote -- this time they were willing to 1/2 their original price, but even that is way out of our budget.

Now we are being forced to seek alternatives to these images, a situation which has the potential to put the integrity of our lesson plan at risk.

What I don't understand is how a national museum, like the Museum of Civilization, can get away with charging a non-profit, educational organization such ridiculously high fees for using images from their collection. Aren't two of the main goals of any museum to educate and serve their public? And aren't the teachers and students who use the EcoKids website considered part of the Museum's "public"? Therefore, shouldn't the rights to these images be more realistically attainable to these sectors of the public?

I'm not saying that the Museum should just give away its copyright permissions. I understand that there were some original costs incurred by the museum in order to photograph these artifacts and a small subsequent cost to host them on the museum's website. But these costs are minuscule compared to the cost of using a single image for a year at the Museum's regular price.

Somehow that just doesn't seem fair.

The Making of a History Nerd: Historical Fiction for the Burgeoning "Buff"

For as long as I can remember, I have been a voracious reader. As a child I read almost anything I could get my hands on, but my favourite was always historical fiction. I can remember many a trip to the library where as soon as I had opened the library's heavy glass doors and stepped onto their truly hideous green astro turf-like carpet, I would make a beeline for the Young Adult section, skimming titles until I had discovered every last book on a historical topic or time period that I could find. In fact, my appetite for historical fiction was so great that it didn't take me long to read nearly every book of this type owned by the Whitby Public Library. (When this happened, I just begged my parents to take me to Oshawa so that I could borrow the books out of their libraries as well.)

Taking a page from previous Public History bloggers Jenna Leifso and Sophie Malek, I wanted to share with you a few of my favourite examples of historical fiction written for Young Adults.

1) Kit Pearson's Guests of War Trilogy (The Sky is Falling, Looking at the Moon, and The Lights Go On Again): It's been well over a decade since I last read these books, but something about this trilogy has stayed with me. The books are set during the tumultuous years of the Second World War and follow the lives of two English children (Norah and her younger brother, Gavin) who are forced by their parents to evacuate their country and move to Canada for the duration of the war. Centering on the coming of age of a female protagonist that was approximately my age when I first read the books and set at least partially in my own country during the historical time period that I have always been most interested in, it is no wonder these books quickly became some of my favourites.

2) Karleen Bradford's The Nine Days Queen: Sophie was a fan, and so was I. This book tells the story of Lady Jane Grey, a young woman who was a reluctant pawn in a chess game played by more powerful men than her. Set in Tudor England, Jane Grey becomes the Queen of England for only nine days before she is dethroned by Mary I and shut away in the Tower of London. If I recall correctly, this was the first book to introduce me to Henry VIII, his wives, and the ensuing struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth I and I have been hooked ever since. In fact, I took a course in 4th year undergrad on Queen Elizabeth I's court. Although a number of other more significant factors played into that decision, my interest in the topic of the English courts probably had some of its roots in my reading of this book.

3) Tie - Ann Rinaldi's A Break With Charity and Arthur Miller's The Crucible: After exhausting my library's WWII historical fiction, I moved on to many other books which prominently featured young female characters. A Break With Charity was my first exposure to the subject of the Salem Witch Trials, a topic which has interested me ever since, inspiring me to read more detailed and accurate historical monographs and to write university level papers on the Salem "witch craze".

It is no secret that traditional history - that which deals with topics such as war, conflict, monarchy and religion - often focuses on old, white men, either as the subject of the piece or as its storyteller. Conversely, historical fiction for young adults - especially books which are geared at younger females - tend to be written by women and focus on young, female characters. They often relate the experiences of middle or lower class families, resulting in a story which is just as likely to feature an extraordinary female at the centre of a conflict or controversy as they are to feature an unnamed witness to the event (an "any woman," if you will). In a lot of cases, these books were my first taste of social history and they had the ability to show me at a very young age the potential that the study of history had.

It might also be interesting to note that reading these books, combined with my subsequent interest in history, has led me to visit both London, England and Salem, Massachusetts to see first-hand the places described in the novels I read as a child. Speaking from first-hand experience, I fully believe that historical fiction has the ability to expose children to history if not in an always accurate or nuanced way, a meaningful way nonetheless. Obviously my understanding of these historical events which I originally obtained through reading these books has been refined, expanded and/or corrected in the years that followed, but the fact remains that this early exposure was critical to the development of my interest in the discipline.

The Future of Publishing

Since September, my peers and I in the Public History program have spent considerable time contemplating the future of publishing in a digital world. Prompted by discussions about Kindles and other e-book readers in our Digital History course, we have often wondered what increased digital technologies means for the historical monograph specifically, and for the book and printed publishing more generally. Some of us (myself, included) have gushed over the ease and portability of e-book readers, but few of us, as staunch lovers of history and the written word, are ready to see printed books phased out entirely any time soon.

Although they aren't ready to do away with hard-copy books just yet, the publishing industry has clearly come on board where electronic publishing is concerned, especially when it comes to hooking younger audiences who may never have known a world without the Internet. In fact, the management team at U.K. educational publisher Dorling Kindersley has used digital media to reach out to students born in the digital era and encourage their love of reading, however they might prefer to consume it.

Watch their ad below:



The medium, the message and the method of delivery are all spot on. Pretty clever, eh?