Touch Points: The Royal Diaries

Storytelling Through Historical Fiction

This is the first of a series of posts I will be doing entitled, “Touch Points”. This has long been a something I have wanted to write about, and something I have attempted to start projects on before.

Everyone has their “touch points” with history. Whether it’s through the books they read, their job, their favorite movies, there is always something. So I want to explore those things, in specificity.

I am a historian. I live and breathe history every day. But history often comes up in some of the most unexpected places. It is not just a topic to look at for people like me. It is the stories that make up place and time. It is the different paths that people could have taken leading to now. It is the politics of old, carving paths for the politics of today.

So I will start with one of my first real touch points: historical fiction. Or in the case of my first really memorable piece of historical fiction: Dear America Diaries.

I don’t remember how old I was when I read my first Dear America Diary. I do know that I was a little obsessed with the passage of the Mayflower in elementary school - partially because I knew I was a Mayflower descendant. But what exactly did that mean? So at some point, I picked up the Dear America Diary about the Mayflower. I honestly don’t remember that much about it now, but I do know that it lead me to other books in the series. Most memorably, Elizabeth I: Red Rose of the House of Tudor by Kathryn Lasky, which I read cover to cover, again and again.

The fact that I then picked up several more books set in and around Elizabethan England as a child point out that this book clearly had me fascinated with the period. (Beware, Princess Elizabeth by Carolyn Meyer and The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood, leap to mind.) While my knowledge of Elizabethan England is not quite as good as it was, I have retained a fair amount that I learned during that period.

I am not alone, I know. Several people I have spoken to point toward historical fiction as being their introduction to history and why they are so keen on it as adults. The key with historical fiction is that it enables us to bring to life people and points in time that we can no longer visit without a little imagination. The next best thing is stumbling on journal entries written by the people who were there.

What was your entry point to history? Do you have more than one?