What can literature teach us about the past that a history textbook cannot?
Methelis: I have my very particular feeling about that, which is a certain trust in fiction to represent the truth without necessarily giving us the facts. The history book will give us facts, which we are told are true, but we know they are chosen for the particular text. It generally doesn’t connect in the same emotional way that a fictional work does. I use quite a bit of material in terms of slaves’ narratives, material from the magazines at that time, newspapers, reviews of Huckleberry Finn in the 1800s as well as in the twentieth century, helping the students understand that the objections to Huckleberry Finn in the 1800s were very different from the objections that we have seen in recent times. It is quite surprising to students that the concerns that people had in the 1800s when the book was published had little to do with race, little to do with language, but much more to do with deportment, much more to do with how a young person was supposed to behave. That opens their eyes
