The Story in History: Writing Your Way Into the Experience

The Story in History gives students and teachers an entirely new way to learn about American history by re-experiencing it from the vantage point of the imaginative writer. In over twenty exercises using sources as various as early maps of the Americans, Walt Whitman's accounts of the Civil War, Sioux oral histories, diaries of the women on the Oregon Trail, ads in 1940s issues of Life, and poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks and Pablo Neruda, students combine research, imagination, and personal memory to explore both the "big events" and everyday life, in their own poems, stories, and plays.