20. Make-Believe History

Show Notes

Alanna Shaffer joins us to talk about how, even when telling made-up stories, we can be aware of biases in the way we talk about history. Whose stories get told? Whose get left behind? And what’s our responsibility to our fictional worlds?

Mentioned reading:

• Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves
• The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence by Max Edelson
• The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
• Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution by Kathleen DuVal
• A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek by Ari Kelman