People seem to be fascinated with the real life tales of other people. Films frequently draw audiences by announcing that they are “based on a true story.” In order to connect with a general audience, historians can use the “real” stories of individuals to convey historical processes and issues. But what happens when we can’t find the real story (and do we ever recover the “real” story anyway)? Should historians use stories to share a message even when the stories don’t really exist?
I really enjoyed exploring the site, “Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704.” Sponsored by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, the website tells about the Indian and French raid on the English settlement of Deerfield. The site offers film clips, sketches, narratives, artifact images, and analysis of the competing cultures. The website creators attempt to tell the stories of all participants, not just the English or French who left written sources. In order to do this, the authors created many “composite characters” to tell the stories of those who did not leave a written record. Crossing many different fields of expertise, historians compiled sources to tell a larger story of U.S. history than just the story of Deerfield. This website utilized the best of current scholarship, but also challenged me to think about the purpose and dangers of creating stories for a general audience.
I will use the story of Frank, John Williams’s African slave, as an example. Williams recorded that Frank was taken in the raid and killed on the march to Canada. He also noted that Frank was married to Parthena, another slave. Yet the website creators use Frank to tell the story of life in Africa, the slave trade and capture, the Middle Passage, life in the West Indies (including Frank’s first wife, birth of four children, and death of three children), then his subsequent sale to New England. Although the story is not written in the first person, the reader really feels like they can understand Frank’s fears and anguish. Yet it is not until the end of the narrative that the reader realizes that only three facts are really known about Frank’s existence. Does the reader feel like she or he learned something, or that the reader was betrayed into thinking that this invented story was actually true?
Just as films often use composite characters to tell a larger story, the narratives on the
Deerfield website can do the same. The story of Frank takes the best of recent historical scholarship—Atlantic world, African, Caribbean, colonial, Native American—to convey historical “truth” as best we know it. Although it is somewhat unsettling to realize that Frank’s story was virtually invented, the tale is useful to think about what enslaved African Americans in the Deerfield settlement may have experienced before their arrival in New England.
The greatest concern is that the website’s stories are so compelling that people may take them to be true rather than suppositions. The creators of the website were careful to explain their process and why they chose to combine multiple stories into one. In all, I think that the risk of the “composite characters” is worth it in order to make people think about all the characters and perspectives. As historian Barry O’Connell writes on the site, “The end to be sought is not to get something ‘absolutely right’ but to make it come alive in all of its uncertainties. The more we can multiply perspectives from many different kinds of people the better able we are to ask useful and specific questions out of which can come the fullest sense both of what did happen in the past and how we might understand and judge it….It is our task, as students and teachers, writers and citizens, to bring everyone and everything out of the mist so we might hear their voices, follow their actions, and respect each person, past and present, as a maker as well as a subject of history.”
I always like to check out the online exhibits at the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon History Project (http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/index.cfm). I like the lesson plans, historical viewers, and abundance of public domain images for classroom use. I can imagine using the site to develop classes on the West, industrialization, etc. Although not necessarily “historical,” another site that I love is “I Predict a Riot” (http://www.bravo.co.uk/IPAR/home.html). Based on a British documentary series, the site has many film clips and background on collective violence in the
UK.
