Tell Me a Story

Over the weekend, I found myself pasting a quote from a recent article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore into my Evernote app. I didn’t want to forget it. The article was focused on how people are wrestling with telling the story of the American Revolution for its upcoming 250^th anniversary. But it made me pause for additional reasons. It forced me to think more deeply about teaching and learning about history. Here is the quote:

Much academic history suffers from pedantry and an almost willful irrelevance, but much popular history fails to tell you anything new or to ask you to confront anything difficult or unsettling (or, in Trumpspeak, anything “inappropriately disparaging”).

Don’t worry! This is not going to be a political rant. I’m genuinely interested in how we wrestle with our past and what we choose to remember.

I completely agree with the Rudyard Kipling quote at the top of this blog post. Stories matter. We remember stories. They are incredibly useful tools for making sense of who we are and why we’re here.

But the tangle we get into is what story we choose to tell.

A good story almost always has a bit of creative license. The best storytellers I know from my own family lean heavily on their creative abilities and hold the facts loosely. I don’t consider them liars; I also don’t believe everything they say. They are sages who are creating the mythology of our family history through their tales. Not all their stories have happy endings, and our ancestors are not always heroes. (Sometimes they make pretty good villains!) Failures fill the plot lines as much as triumphs. Gradually, all the separate strands of family stories begin to weave together to give us a better picture of who we are, where we came from, and why we’re here today.

Jill Lepore asks us to consider what versions of the American Revolution we’re going to hold up during the 250^th anniversary celebrations. This is a harder question for me when it’s not private family folklore. I admit, I kind of want my ancestors to be one of the “good guys” in a national history story. These stories have a much broader audience. People are watching!

But maybe it’s time to grow up and recognize that getting history right is far more complicated than telling a single story. It needs to be a huge pile of stories. And we’re not doing it right if they don’t contradict each other.

Exceptional historical research asks us to pay attention to more than one story. Pile up the tales and consider the sources and motives behind the telling of each. Gradually, we’ll begin to weave together an epic.

I’m not sure why some people think we can’t handle imperfect stories. We have experience in this world. We know it’s contradictory and confusing and almost never follows a predictable plot line. We’re not so fragile that we will only listen to the happy fairytale and cover our ears to everything else. Give us a big stack of stories. Let us experience them and remember them. Let them contradict each other, so we’re inspired to seek out more stories on our way to understanding a deeper truth.

Better yet, let’s create our own stories from artifacts of history, too. We can be more than consumers of someone else’s truth. We can put fresh eyes on relics and consider a new way of telling tales. We live in a world that couldn’t possibly have been imagined in 1776. That means we will have new interpretations that thread history through additional events that have happened between then and now.

Unlike my wonderful storytelling relatives, we don’t need to embellish the facts to make history a good story. Really, you couldn’t make up half the stuff that really happened. We can tell the stories well, engaging audiences through voice, writing, movement, art, film, video, and music, and still search for the truth in the telling.

Maybe we’ll start with artifacts and then ask ourselves: I wonder what this looked like from that person’s point of view . . . and that person . . . and that person . . .

We will let curiosity take over and replay events from every angle we are able to find.

Somebody once said, “History is written by the victors.” But we don’t need to buy into that statement. There is no rule that says history must be written by the victors. Stories belong to all of us.

Philip Mead, curator of “The Declaration’s Journey,” which opened in October in Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, said something else in this article that will help us in our quest to tell interesting and accurate stories:

You know what they say about stories? There are two plots. A stranger comes to town, or a man goes on a trip.

"The Declaration’s Journey" exhibit follows how ideas in the Declaration of Independence have traveled around the world over time. That sounds like a worthy pursuit of new and interesting stories.

We can all be storytellers. Academics don’t get all the fun.

Tell me a story!