{"id":4252,"date":"2026-10-26T22:16:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T02:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=4252"},"modified":"2026-10-27T00:36:40","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T04:36:40","slug":"american-history-the-american-arts-and-the-uses-of-historical-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2026\/10\/american-history-the-american-arts-and-the-uses-of-historical-fiction.html","title":{"rendered":"American History, the American Arts, and the Uses of Historical Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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— “Historical fiction” and “History” span an unbroken continuum<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From today’s edition<\/a> of “The Arts Fuse”:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite suddenly, the writing and teaching of American History are an exigent topics, both on the left and the right.\u00a0\u00a0What might be the timeliest strategies for studying and imparting the history of the United States? How best teach history in high schools and colleges?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I newly ponder these questions having just read a majestic \u201cnovel of Civil War New York\u201d: Peter Quinn\u2019s Banished <\/em>Children of Eve<\/em> (1994). Quinn\u2019s topic is New York\u2019s draft riots of 1863. My knowledge of this event had been scant: I knew that Irish-Americans hostile to African-Americans had violently opposed Civil War conscription. Quinn\u2019s treatment is capacious but indirect. There is no \u201cstory.\u201d Rather, he tracks the activities of a dozen residents of roiling Manhattan, mostly Irish, and also delves into their origins in impoverished Ireland. The riots are understood as an inescapable wartime consequence transcending individual agency. I have never read a more instructive American history book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only two of Quinn\u2019s main characters \u2013 the composer Stephen Foster and Archbishop John Hughes \u2013 are historical. The others, including a star blackface minstrel and a mixed-race actress in Uncle<\/em> Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, are invented yet representative. By comparison, E. L. Doctorow\u2019s admirable sequence of novels exploring episodes of the American narrative, while equally vivid in their recreation of time and place, superimpose plots that risk blurring the grand lines of cultural memory.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I come to Quinn having in recent years written a couple of historical novels of my own: The<\/em><\/strong> Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age<\/em><\/strong><\/a>] and The Marriage<\/a>: The Mahlers in New York <\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are kindred exercises returning to stories I have told as \u201cfact.\u201d The necessity of putting words into the mouths of the Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl, and of Gustav and Alma Mahler proved revelatory. Via impersonation, I learned things about my real-life actors I had not previously gleaned.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, I have come to regard historical fiction as a vital tool for the cultural historian. Unlike Quinn\u2019s novel, or those of Doctorow, mine are exclusively populated by characters who actually lived and died. And the incidents I recreate actually transpired. Perhaps the genre I attempt could be called \u201ccreative non-fiction.\u201d In any event, I have become keenly aware that \u201chistorical fiction\u201d and \u201chistory\u201d span an unbroken continuum. The incidents and people at hand must be embellished and interpreted \u2013 and this contextualization can take many forms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can also broach different genres. Martin Scorsese\u2019s meticulously detailed Gangs of New York<\/em> (2002) features the same draft rioters that inhabit Peter Quinn\u2019s novel \u2013 and devolves into a bloody melodrama. Ken Burns\u2019s TV documentaries artfully animate historical events. But these acclaimed films \u2013 and films in general (unless silent) \u2013 do not in my experience invite as personalized a response as books. Books more require an exercise of imagination. When Quinn describes the lynching of a young African-American he\u2019s tracked for 300 pages, I have to stop reading. There is no stopping a film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is: Quinn\u2019s dogged account of the hunting, taunting, and mutilation of an innocent victim of prejudice is ultimately envisioned by the reader, not the author. It engenders a cumulative visceral experience not to be acquired from a movie, or scattershot via AI and the internet. For that matter, any number of readers and reviewers<\/a><\/strong> of my novel about the Mahlers in New York testify that they\u2019ve acquired a newly compassionate understanding of Gustav\u2019s controversial spouse. Certainly that was my own experience imagining Alma\u2019s response to new challenges posed by a new environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Might historical fiction also prove a vital resource for the educator? Might it speak to today\u2019s high school and college students, riddled with ever shorter attention spans? Might it instill an interest in the creative word?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first attempt at historical fiction, back in 2003, was a short book for young adults: Dvorak<\/em><\/strong> and America<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. My goal was to inspire Social Studies teachers to sneak the arts into the classroom by a back door.<\/p>\n\n\n

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During his three-year sojourn in the United States (1892-1895), Antonin Dvorak proved a musical de Tocqueville. Challenged to distinguish what most defined the New World versus the Old, he came up with three seminal attributes: Native Americans in danger of extinction, African Americans once enslaved, and a vast American West he found both melancholic and majestic. He inscribed these impressions in the most famous, most beloved symphony ever composed on American Soil: \u201cFrom the New World,\u201d premiered by Anton Seidl\u2019s New York Philharmonic in 1893.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dvorak also issued a landmark prophecy: that \u201cNegro melodies\u201d would foster a \u201cgreat and noble school\u201d of American classical music. (Instead, they would foster popular musical genres known the world over.) He grasped that the sorrow songs of the South were (as W. E. B. De Bois would put it a decade later) \u201cthe spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.\u201d For an assistant, Dvorak hired a young African-American from Erie, Pennsylvania. This was Harry Burleigh, who would become the key player in turning spirituals into concert songs. Dvorak was fascinated by the most popular nineteenth century American literary text: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s The Song of Hiawatha<\/em> \u2013 which inspired many a passage in his New World<\/em> Symphony. He apparently attended Buffalo Bill\u2019s Wild West Show. He spent three weeks observing the itinerant Kickapoo Medicine Show in Spillville, Iowa. He attended the 1893 World Columbia Exposition in Chicago. His employer at New York City\u2019s National Conservatory of Music, Jeannette Thurber, successfully enticed Black students with free tuition. In 1894, at the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, Dvorak conducted the school\u2019s inter-racial orchestra, and an all-Black chorus, in a program including his own transcription of Stephen Foster\u2019s \u201cOld Folks at Home\u201d; the soloists were Burleigh and the premiere Black concert soprano of her time: Sissieretta Jones. The concert was ingeniously publicized by the supreme exponent of Yellow Journalism: James Creelman, whose subsequent on-site reportage would influence the Spanish-American War and the Mexican Revolution. Dvorak\u2019s advocates also included Henry Krehbiel, the dean of New York\u2019s music critics, who wrote a pivotal book-length study of \u201cAfrican-American Folk Songs.\u201d Upon visiting Boston, however, Dvorak was denounced as a \u201cnegrophile\u201d: a tale of two cities. He returned to Prague when Mrs. Thurber\u2019s husband was knocked out by the Panic of 1893.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inhabiting these formidable people and events for young readers, my little Dvorak<\/em> and America<\/em> book produced a personal epiphany. I had already written extensively about Dvorak\u2019s and Seidl\u2019s New York, had already spent years digging into archives to fathom Seidl\u2019s New World fate. Hypothetically situating Seidl and Dvorak at the round table of Fleischmann\u2019s Caf\u00e9 (their daily Union Square hangout), I discovered I could hear Seidl speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cIncidentally, I have been looking at your new symphony. The second movement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Dvorak bristled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cIt is a slow movement, nein<\/em>?\u201d said Seidl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Dvorak exhaled a gust of cigar smoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cAndante<\/em>, you call it,\u201d Seidl continued in his low steady voice. \u201cBut I am sure that it is slower. A Largo<\/em>. That is to get underneath, to the inner meaning. The Innigkeit<\/em>.\u201d . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Dvorak confronted Sield\u2019s gaze. \u201cNo one can sing so slowly,\u201d he said. \u201cBurleigh. . . \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cJa! Ja!<\/em> Burleigh!\u201d Seidl snorted and glanced away. \u201cThis is not Burleigh. This is Heimweh<\/em> — homesickness. Your \u2018New World\u2019 Symphony is an \u2018Old World\u2019 Symphony. Negro music, Indian music, it is all very fine. It is what the Americans call window dressing. It is not the heart of this music . Your heart \u2013 is it in New York? Or in Bohemia?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Seidl pointed at his chest. Dvorak ordered another Pilsner. Minutes passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cDo as you please,\u201d said Dvorak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Seidl lifted his watch from his pocket. \u201cI must rehearse,\u201d he said, and left the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I subsequently enjoyed opportunities to deploy the Dvorak\/America story in various settings, most memorably at the Boston Latin School during a brief stint on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. I also had occasion, in 2010, to lead a \u201cDvorak and America\u201d NEH Teacher-Training Institute — a three-week exercise hosting 30 high school teachers from around the nation. The participants included a teacher from a Dallas private school who happened to be part of the team overseeing the Advanced Placement American History curriculum. He informed me that the AP curriculum included no music. He subsequently proposed that a day be set aside for the Dvorak\/New World story. His proposal failed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was sixteen years ago \u2013 when a crisis in humanities education was not yet widely decried.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My confidence in historical fiction as a tool for the scholar is by now a boundless conviction. But I\u2019m not sure what pertinence it may have to present-day pedagogy. What I do know is that transcending the STEM curriculum has never been more imperative \u2013 and that linking history to music, literature, and the visual arts is a necessary opportunity.  It\u2019s a truism that the arts \u2013 and participation in the arts, and learning about the arts \u2013 do not require \u201cpractical\u201d justification. And yet I have no doubt that the arts are empowering. They power individual self-knowledge and communal self-knowledge. Not least, they are morally empowering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This last claim fell into disfavor over the course of the twentieth century. It needs to be revisited. Dvorak, Seidl, and their New World adherents took it for granted. For them, it supported a posture of empathic understanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most iconic vignette of Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s funeral train shows a weeping Navy accordionist named Graham Jackson. He is playing the spiritual \u201cGoin\u2019 Home\u201d — for FDR\u2019s sad return to Hyde Park.  One of the things the story of Dvorak in America teaches is that this familiar tune is not quoted in the Largo of the New World<\/em> Symphony.  Rather, it\u2019s a melody Dvorak himself composed<\/em> in the style of the spirituals Harry Burleigh sang for him. His pupil Harry Rowe Shelley, for whom he first played it, testified that Dvorak shared \u201cthe immortal theme with great passion and fervor, his eyes bulging out, his blood purple red in the neck veins, his whole body vibrating.\u201d Another Dvorak pupil, William Arms Fisher, added the words eighteen years following Dvorak\u2019s death. After that, \u201cGoin\u2019 Home\u201d was famously sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson \u2013 names, I have discovered, no longer known even to African-American undergraduates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However imparted, this tale is one today\u2019s students of American history deserve to know. It opens a back door that some may choose to enter.<\/p>\n\n\n

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P.S. — John McWhorter’s latest New York Times<\/em> column<\/a> tackles a related topic — when is a novelist entitled to inhabit someone else’s real life experience? John’s answer is: go right ahead. He memorably writes: “The idea that one should write from only one\u2019s own experience is a willfully narrow-minded attack on creativity, empathy and even reason. It is cherished most by a vocal and generally younger minority, to whom the literary world caters out of fear of being called dirty names on social media, as well as mere expedience.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

— “Historical fiction” and “History” span an unbroken continuum From today’s edition of “The Arts Fuse”: Quite suddenly, the writing and teaching of American History are an exigent topics, both on the left and the right.\u00a0\u00a0What might be the timeliest strategies for studying and imparting the history of the United States? How best teach history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-16A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4252"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4268,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions\/4268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}