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Mark Philip Bradley, Inside the History Lab, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 951–956, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae357
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Extract
The late nineteenth century cotton dress that floats across the cover of the September AHR offers a marvelous illustration of the diversity of histories and methods that make up this edition of the History Lab. Resources for teaching material culture, reviews of historical fiction, new histories of the welfare state, and explorations of the challenges of writing across the borders of history and race are among the issues addressed in the September 2024 Lab.
Twenty-one reviews of contemporary historical fiction open the Lab. They include novels, graphic narratives, films, and plays that take on historical issues across time and space from the trial of a mid-nineteenth century English scamster, the sleuthing of an imaginary Russian nun, and the biography of a queer fictional twelfth century mystic to explorations of the 1680 Pueblo revolt, critical moments in Zulu history, and the instabilities of social class in postcolonial Malaysia. Although many of us often teach individual works of historical fiction in our classes, long time readers of the AHR know that this genre has not been a part of the more than six hundred works of history we review annually in the journal. Mounting this forum on historical fiction is part of the broader effort in the Lab to explore the diverse ways, beyond the monograph and the traditional article, that historical work is made. Our choices on which works to review for this forum were intentionally broad and idiosyncratic. We asked members of our Board of Editors and our Associate Review Editors to nominate what they saw as some of the most creative works of contemporary historical fiction in their fields of specialty that they thought would teach especially well. We then assembled a team of reviewers whom we asked to examine these works not so much for their historical veracity but rather with an eye toward surfacing what historical fiction can tell us about the past that other works of history cannot, the innovative forms and voices through which these works engage with their readers, and what reviewers saw as the gains and losses of these fictionalized histories. Taken together, we hope their reviews will offer readers a kaleidoscopic perspective on the making of historical fiction as a genre in the present moment.
