According to my research, every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. What I didn’t know when I was 11—and, in fact, didn’t know until a couple of weeks ago—is that Kidnapped was based on a true story. In 1728, a boy named James Annesley, the son of a baron, was kidnapped, forced into indentured servitude, escaped, and tried to prove his aristocratic lineage in the days before fingerprints, photographs, and DNA.
That true story is told in a new book, Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped, by Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech. Mr. Ekirch spoke about the book yesterday at the Library of Congress. It was all very interesting but these are the two things that stuck with me most:
• In 18th-century England, kidnapping was a misdemeanor while stealing a horse was a felony punishable by death.
• This quote from Baron Arthur Anneseley, James’s father: “If you come to live with me you shall never want a shilling in your pocket, a gun to fowl, a horse to ride, or a whore.”
So there you go. Ekirch also explained how the story of James Annesley had been more or less ignored by academic historians. One reason for that, he said, was the divide between historians and historical novelists: The former are interested, for the most part, in what lots of people do, while the latter are interested in what a few people do. And historical novelists are primarily concerned with telling really good stories while historians care about getting the facts right. (Arguable generalizations, I realize; that’s why there’s a comment button below.)
Anyway, when it comes to the story of James Anneseley, a historian might be more interested in what it tells us about the 18th century, which is certainly valid. But the rest of us want to find out what happens next. Did he ever prove his birthright? What happened to the evil uncle who had him kidnapped in the first place? How did he escape?
Ekirch, by the way, said he wanted to tell a story that was both compelling and true.
For me, and I’d argue for most other barbarians, the narrative engine would push me through such a book, and along the way I’d pick up all kinds of fascinating information about 18th-century England (like the law protecting horses better than children). But if you told me the book was about daily life in the mid-1700s I would be … less interested. Does that make me lazy? Or should history be more about story?
10 Responses to Why Isn’t History More Interesting?
11118131 - April 16, 2010 at 3:55 pm
It seems to me that it’s not just history, it’s much the same across the social sciences. Certainly my students treat Islamic Studies as being very much on the history side of the history/historical novel divide.
12041844 - April 16, 2010 at 4:02 pm
As an adjunct teaching history survey courses, I find students are far more receptive to history as story. Beyond the narrative text, I frequently add short books that tell history as novels. Students, for example, enjoy reading Robert Darnton. To find history relevant and interesting, students must be connected to the past. The tools we use to achieve that will determine the desired outcomes.
philosophy - April 16, 2010 at 4:35 pm
I wonder what actual historians think about “narrative histories,” of which there have been a good many and some have had wide readership. Eg. Shelby Foote, David McCullough, Dee Brown, Antonia Fraser, Stephen Ambrose, . . .
francishamit - April 16, 2010 at 10:38 pm
I wrote my book about Belle Boyd as a novel rather than a straight history zas a business decision. I want to sell a lot of copies. But since so many people are interested in the American Civil Ware, I also knew that I would have to follow known facts, characters and events very closely. The real challenge is not the what” but the “why”. That took ten years of close reading and comparative research. People get Ph. D s for less effort. In the process was able to reframe the arguments about the war and add new context.
susanekg1 - April 17, 2010 at 7:42 am
One of the challenges of writing interesting historical prose is that historians tend to write for other historians, and these are usually specialists in some narrow subfield. As a result, we are generally obliged to assume lots of knowledge that most undergraduates and the general public don’t possess.For instance, the generalization that begins this piece–”every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson”–(perhaps that’s a joke?)is, of course, not true, and if an historian assumed that fact, she would lose the large proportion of American undergrads who not only never read Kidnapped, but who have never read an entire novel, along with students from other parts of the world who might have read lots of books, but who never heard of Stevenson.Likewise, we can no longer assume general knowledge among our colleagues in other fields, as I realized recently in a conversation with an academic specializing in information technology. When I brought up the writings of Thoreau, it was immediately apparent that he had heard of Thoreau, but had never read any of his work, and that I had wrongly assumed that every highly educated person must have read Thoreau at some point, which turned out to be as false as the assertion that every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped.There are lots of factors behind the fragmentation of shared knowledge, but I think that a major cause is that we now write to prove productivity rather than to prove a point. Since we’re supposed to extend our c.v.’s, and we can’t expect even the people who review them to read or understand our work, we tend to address the usually tiny audience that we see at conferences, which is a sure-fire formula for boring and uninformative prose.
mhigbee - April 19, 2010 at 9:19 am
What’s missing, I think, from this interesting little story, is any consideration of what the purposes of historical writing are; more specifically, most historians, like scholars in all fields, seek to contribute new knowledge to their fields. Entertaining narratives – like those of Stephen Ambrose – rarely make such contributions to ‘knowledge’ in a field, even though they may provide lots of knowledge to the non specialist readers. History, unlike most academic fields, has a large lay (non scholarly) audience that’s interested in history. Much of that audience is interested in celebratory and monumental history writing; scholars aren’t. It’s a blessing and a curse to the historical profession to have these divergent populations of potential readers. Nobody faults physicists for writing for other physicists instead of the average intelligent reader.
tebartlett - April 20, 2010 at 1:25 pm
@mhigbee Point taken. In the case of Birthright, though, I think Ekirch would argue that he IS contributing new knowledge to the field — years of research, poring over court transcripts and letters, etc. But he tried to take that information and turn it into an engaging narrative …
22253510 - April 21, 2010 at 9:57 am
I’m not a historian, but to me it makes sense that kidnapping was only a misdemeanor since that was how ships often got more crew members in those days — they were impressed, or forced into naval service, just as in the Stevenson book. There was no reason for Parliament to make a felony of such a common practice until they made life on ships less brutal, encouraging more men to willingly volunteer for jobs at sea.
garyvnichols - April 22, 2010 at 9:54 am
Being a young history professor I have found that telling history in narrative form during my lectures gets the students’ attention. If I were to list names, dates, ship names, and types of weapons during my lecture on piracy I am sure most of them would be in dreamland. However giving them a narrative while at the same time using different voices I found they wrote more notes, asked more questions, and wanted to read more on the subject. Books are the same way, a smooth narrative drives the story while the more academic writing causes the book to remain on a dusty bookshelf.
lamorrow - April 23, 2010 at 5:15 am
My son was fascinated by the History Channel but disappointed in many of its programming choices when he was in middle school. It seems to me that this is a case where content could be greatly improved by peer reviewed by historians with an eye towards creating minds. One thing that could be done now would be to create a peer-reviewed website — perhaps at the Chronicle of Higer Education — that discussed each story on the channel from an historic standpoint. This would at least give prospective history students a place to look for other, more historic accounts of the topics on the channel and might help to point out how this potentially valuable gateway to interest in real history is currenly being wasted.