Rant on Primary Source Reading — Mary Catelli
An aspiring writer ought to read history. Lots of it. Even if — perhaps especially if — he intends to write SF or fantasy and build societies of his own. And the most important thing he should read is primary source, which is to say, stuff that was actually written at the time. Jane’s letter to her Aunt Hortensia. Esmeralda Doe’s diary. The cook book, the book about the Rules of Love, philosophical dialogs. Even fiction. Or as Chesterton put it:
“We should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon’s History, Evelyn’s Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell’s own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.”
This isn’t to do research, though you may find it useful later. It’s to expand your horizons. And knock your block off. To learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. You will read things in which people will casually take for granted something you never even dreamed that other people could think. It will let you in the possibilities. And you will learn that even if people thought the way you did, they could talk about it, and reason about it, very differently. It lets you get inside the heads of people different from you. This is why reading a lot of works from societies you have no interest in is still a help. Even if the exact facts you learn do not prove useful, they will remind you not to assume, so deeply you don’t even notice it, that things are the way you are familiar with.
It also helps avert the opposite fault: thinking, “The past is a different country. They do things differently there,” and cheerfully attributing to them behavior that fits the most modern stereotypes about the era, because it’s different. Even on the simplest level — I once read a writer discussing world-building, who asserted that a medieval king would never have been called the Sun King because the term would have had no meaning in a geocentric universe. groan. Plenty of ancient and medieval kings used solar imagery. “Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this son of York” is predicated on the actual use of the sun in War of the Roses heraldry. For one thing, the center of the universe was a bad place to be in the Ptolemaic universe, because it was the bottom of the universe.
As a sideline of this, it also gives an idea of how varied views can be while still fitting in the framework of a very different society. When Millais exhibited The Order of Release, one reviewer denounced the woman in it as “the hardest looking creature you can imagine,” but another praised her as “firm of purpose, sheds no tear” — which was, actually, the common view, since for the first time, they had to put not only a railing but also a guard at the exhibit.
It also develops a sense of how a society fits together. An instinct that alerts you to whether you really can throw together a society from bits of another. A society with a strict hereditary hierarchy is not one in which your oldest son can go gallivanting off on a merchant expedition and then return with a baseborn bride without consequence.
Of course, there’s an art to reading primary source usefully. Lots of reading will give you practice at that, but some pointers:
No one writes anything without a purpose, and that purpose will dictate what they write. Even those who write to illuminate their own time for future generations will illuminate it according to their own lights. Once you learn to glean their purpose, it may be the most valuable thing about them. Even works of history can be primary source for the era in which they are written because they are written with a purpose; Victorian folklorists cheerfully writing of the origin of folklore and fairy tales are often horrible at everything except the mindset of Victorian folklorists, on which they are superb. (Sleeping Beauty is a solar myth, and Hansel and Gretel, and The Frog King — and Napoleon Bonaparte. The writer who gravely proved the last according to the same logic that the folklorists were using on fairy tales probably did the most to ensure that the theory lost currency.)
Not that you can’t take anything at face value. Metaphors are usually safe — which is to say, because a work of St. Augustine’s has the casual statement that something was like a bethrothal, which lasted a year or two, I think it’s safe to say that in his time betrothals generally lasted a year or two before the wedding proper. Aelfric of Eynsham is beloved of Anglo-Saxon scholars because he wrote a work, the Colloquy, to teach his students conversational Latin, and the subject matter was trades and occupations, so he didn’t have an ax to grind about them.
But other than that. . . .
Where most writers go astray, I think, is in confusing prescriptive with descriptive writing. Whether an etiquette book or a law, people saying what people ought to do are not therefore describing what they do do — necessarily. Some people go overboard there, too, and say that rules are only laid down when a behavior is widely practiced, even if disapproved of. This I would think certain only for rules that are argued about and defended. A rule that is off-handedly mentioned may actually be the rule, too widely accepted to get into a frenzy about. OTOH, it can also be a dead letter.
And then, you often have to reconstruct the other side. Wide reading can only do so much — especially in eras when reading everything that exists doesn’t really make it wide. But with, say Andreas Capullanus’s Art of Love, you can read that love is impossible between a married couple — and note that he argues for it at length and presents it as a case settled by a Court of Love. Someone argued against it, even then.
Plus, you can fall off a cliff chasing someone’s purpose. You can miss irony. The classic example being the readers who assume that “A Modest Proposal” is serious. On the other hand, you can impute irony when it’s not intended. You can hypothesize that Juvenal wasn’t really satirizing the decadence of Rome, but the stuffy old-guard who minded. John Milton — some people argue that Satan’s arguing for liberty and equality. They miss that Satan interrupts his own argument to point out that the offense against him doesn’t annul degree and position, because he only wants to revolt against God, not have his own angels revolt against him.
There is also the aspect that people tend to write about the extraordinary, not the usual. You get more dramatic effects when you read reports of how horrific a certain noble was. Not only do you have deal with the agenda of the person writing about him, which would probably give motives to blacken him, you also have to deal with the issue that the noble (because he is being written about) is probably an outlier. Or the story of the ancien regime French nobleman whose son said that he had heard his father intended to marry him to a certain mademoiselle and was it true — and who retorted that his son should mind his own business. Not the sort of incident that would occur in a society with more freedom for the young people to make their own matches, but that the story was told at all is evidence that the nobleman had gone — a little far.
A traveler would notice more than the person on the spot, but when reading travelers’ tales, it is wise to remember that he may have misunderstood what was going on. Also, he probably would suffer no repercussions whatsoever if he embellished his account — not only his place in it, but with details that underscore how shockingly barbaric the barbarians are, or just prurient or violent details. So travelers’ tales have their upsides and downsides as well.
Actually, reading good scholarly secondary source is an aid to it, because they discuss their evidence and so afford a good example. But there’s no substitute to reading lots.
According To Hoyt 
What Mary says about visitors accounts is important, btw. When I researched for Soul of Fire one of the important things was the geography of the city. One of the visitor accounts talked about Maidan park. it wasn’t until it was in copyedit that the copyeditor pointed out to me Maidan MEANS park, and we don’t actually know the park’s name because of that.
Quaint notion–that people didn’t think the sun was particularly important until someone figured out that the earth revolves around it instead of vice versa. Why, until then, the sun hardly meant anything to anybody! It wasn’t prominent in every religion, no one much cared about its impact on life and crops, it wasn’t an important metaphor for anything, hardly anyone but obscure astronomers paid much attention to its properties. Sheesh.
Yup. Got it in one.
That would also be why the various sun deities — Apollo, Baldur, Horus, Mithra — were typically minor gods of no importance.
Hmm. I must point out that technically for most of the time in which he was worshiped, Apollo was not the sun god — that was Helios. Apollo as a sun god was Hellenistic innovation and wasn’t even firmly established until Christian times, actually.
I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis “On Reading Old Books” (think that’s the correct title). [Smile]
Was that the same place where C.S. Lewis pointed out the error of “chronological snobbery” that I use as one of my philosophical guiding points?
Very important to read primary sources, and to read them correctly.
I am reminded of a response to the line ‘”amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics” – to wit: professionals study everything (with emphasis on everything.) Good ideas need a good resource.
I was amazed at the stuff I discovered when I stated to look into my favorite railroad’s biggest project(electrification of the New Haven RR) and discovered that all the financial shenanigans that had supposedly gone on and had been the ‘common knowledge” for decades were simply the result of the electrification and the requirements of building the first electrical grid. The so called history of the New Haven in that time. written by a man named Weller, doesn’t even mention the word “electrification,” yet without understanding that you can’t understand most of the rest. It’s not as the results of the electrification were not obvious, yet Weller was so caught up in his view of things and the Progressive narrative that all those wires, power plants and such just disappeared from the picture.
The New Haven’s attempt to achieve a regional transportation monopoly by purchase of virtually all the electric street railroads in CT and RI (and some in MA) at above market prices, and purchase and completion of the ailing NYW&B, didn’t it help finances. It did result in some first rate infrastructure that was great at moving masses of people, though.
It always seems strange to me. The Progressives spent the first half of the 20th Century condemning against and crying out against virtually all private rail transportation companies. The funded highways, airport and airline development, and in some cases competing public subways and streetcar lines. They altered tax codes and issued decrees that lessened competitiveness and profitability. And then after a few decades, as their policies drove the railroads out of the passenger business or outright out of business, they suddenly said the automobile is a horror and everybody needs to the ride the railroads and buses, and of course we’ll need to spend billions to construct the new public railroads. Evil Progressive plot, or just incompetence? You decide.
Evil Progressive plot, or just incompetence? You decide.
I don’t think I need to decide between the two.
Because they’re not mutually exclusive? Or because I’ve overlooked an alternative explanation?
It’s too early (before coffee) to be serious, but in this case you’re talking about different generations of Progressives.
There’s a very creepy “History of Public Transportation” display at the central bus hub in our town. They show all the private-0wned interurbans (that went all the way from Dayton to Cincinnati and Columbus, among other towns) and all the various private bus and streetcar and trolley bus companies, and then they show them all narrowed down to one greatly reduced public RTA bus system. Sort of a “Yay! We made it suck!” thing.
Btw, re: Google buses, John H. Patterson was worried about NCR people being able to get to work on time (because everybody who went to work at the same time was flooding the streetcars at the same time), so he instituted NCR streetcars and buses to pick people up at certain big stops a little ways out of downtown. Later these came in useful for transporting people out of the 1913 Flood areas up to NCR and the Fairgrounds, which were high and dry.
Through the late 1920’s you could get from Dayton to as far away by electric interurban as Sheboygan, WI; Bay City, MI; Louisville, KY; Syracuse, NY; and Terre Haute, IN, although you would have to change trains a few times along the way. The electric interurbans even pioneered some early piggyback freight, only to have state regulatory agencies ban them as a highway tax evasion scheme. But the steam railroads got everywhere first so had much of the freight traffic locked in, various levels of government subsidized highway competition that took away much of the local passenger traffic and express freight, and FDR’s Public Utility Holding Company Act raised expenses by forcing the separation of the power companies from the electric railroads.
Really, it’s anything they can use to spend immense amounts of money and gain more control over people’s lives. So yes, evil plot, but also incompetence, because everything they do is crap. Unless that’s intentional, in which case, it’s an evil, but highly delusional, plot.
That was the whole point. The New Haven was NOT trying to buy all the trolley companies to build a New England Transportation Monopoly. They were buying ELECTRIC companies so that the railroad could build a power grid to support railroad electrification. That’s why electrification is essential to understanding the New Haven’s actions. Most of the trolley companies were losers and the people at the top of the New Haven knew that. I have quotes from Mellon to that effect. But if the electrification was to be continued, something JP Morgan really wanted, with good reason, there needed to exist an integrated power supply to handle the load, so the New Haven had to assemble it. That became clear right from the start of electric operations. It just was not efficient to run a Cos Cob power plant style operation that only provide railroad power. That’s why you see the New Haven purchasing CT Light and Railway and Hartford Electric, along with a bunch of others, but not say, the Shore Line Electric. As for the Westchester, the big problem is that it was only half the railroad as constructed. The other half would have provide an electric freight bridge from Danbury. The reason for doing that was to, in effect, create a northern trunk line into the South Bronx. There was also the hope that the Westchester would relieve the New Haven of the obligation of having to provide commuter service west of Port Chester into Grand Central, which due to the trackage rights charges from the NY Central caused the New Haven to lose money on every ticket west of Port Chester. Of course Weller was too eager to find the scoundrel in Morgan and Mellon and sort of missed the significant details, all of which I found when I started looking a the electrification.
Whether an etiquette book or a law, people saying what people ought to do are not therefore describing what they do do — necessarily. Some people go overboard there, too, and say that rules are only laid down when a behavior is widely practiced, even if disapproved of.
Can I laugh about how these are both examples of trying to treat people like computers– simple to understand once you know the trick?
…and that my husband just grumbled that he wished he remembered how he thought as a kid, so he’d get the “trick” to dealing with our kids. 😀
Is very human!
Oh, yes. so you want your characters to do it. But not you.
When the Daughtorial Unit was toddling I was wont to mutter that I couldn’t wait until she was voice operable … then I realized it was a random access command code.
I very much enjoyed reading Pepys’ diary online, where they would only post one day’s worth at a time. It really emphasized how *slow* everything was. Pepys walked pretty much everywhere to gather gossip (he would call it “obtaining information” no doubt, but it was gossip and marvel-seeking for the most part…). How Washing Day (once a month, need it or not!) took basically 24 hours and three women and turned the house upside down. I got tired just reading about it.
My sister once did some research involving primary sources at the Library of Congress. She happened on the personal diary of some guy who was sent to France shortly after the Revolution (ours, not theirs) for diplomatic purposes. I’m afraid he went a bit native regarding recreational sex 😉 What astonished her was while he was certainly a *coff* busy lad, he never used the same euphemism for sex twice. “Did as our ancestors did before us” being an example.
In a less salacious vein, I love old Baedeker guides. Since they are advising people of the time how to get around in a foreign location, they cover the matters viewed as important e.g. how to hire a hansom cab in Berlin and the proper amount to tip a chambermaid in a hotel.
Mark Twain has a number of travelogues, which I find to be delicious. Come to think of it, so does Kipling and Sir Richard Burton. Kipling is more fun to read than Burton.
Burton was *looks over top of glasses* an, ahem, serious traveler and scholar. *relaxes pose* Kipling “just” watched people and took notes. 🙂
And Mark Twain gathered impressions for his lectures. And was a hoot.
I frequently recall an old Sid Harris column in which he cited a 19th Century Chinese guidebook for England which expressed amazement that the British took such pains to preserve all life, even those babies delivered of prostitutes.
Travel guides should be read for what they find remarkable, not what they find jejune.
Well, what they find jejune can also surprise us. Off-hand mention of how to do something is more convincing than the flat statement that you should.
It is also important to read original sources because a lot of later writers with axes to grind may may not have understood the premise to begin with. I finally read Malthus’ Essay on the Principals of Population, the one where the “Malthusian Trap”, where everyone breeds like rats in a lab and outstrips the food supply is supposed to come from. What he actually was saying is that if we throw away the moderating elements in our lives, religion and family and society of laws in favor of these Utopian philosophies springing up in France and England, we will make this happen. He was also deeply concerned with famine, and considered that manufacturing took capacity away from raising food, but it had only been 20 years since the end of the Irish famine and 60 years from the English Midlands famine, so his concern was probably justified. it is also an interesting look into the English attitude that true wealth was in land.
The constant tension between the need for and the danger of explanations. . . .
Sometimes you really do need an explanation. A passage saying that the punishment for rape is death unless the woman instead agrees to marry him is much more intelligible when you realize they are following Roman law — under which the consent of the woman was not a defense against charges of rape.
Ms Catelli is 100% correct in her observations and yet she leaves out what I see as the most interesting (which doesn’t mean important) part of the whole process. Questioning agendas is important. Evaluating whether or not something is true and why a specific tidbit was include. Sometimes you can come across a bigger question that way. Finding the answer to your own question can be downright fascinating. An example is in order.
When I was doing my BA in history I did a senior thesis on the involvement of the Heer, the German Army, in the Holocaust. They were up to their neck in it. That wasn’t the interesting part though. I managed to get my hands on a couple of reports (well, translations) written by commanders of units that had conducted massacres. Every report mentioned that the men had high morale after the shootings. Every one used the sentence “The morale of the men is good.” It made me wonder if the commanders (actually platoon leaders in most cases) had been instructed to include it in their correspondence. At that point I started wondering where the truth was. Unfortunately, I only had a semester and I never found out.
There is a story there either way. To me it’s the weird things like this where the interest builds. Filling in the blanks is what makes it fun.
Oh and for those that didn’t know: The best way to find out what primary sources exist is to find a scholarly history, usually published by a university press, and mine the footnoes/endnotes. You can usually get some good scholarly stuff through your local library if you’re not rich too.
yep.
Definitely helps. It also, if it’s a good secondary source, discusses how it came to its conclusions from the primary sources, which can help with the reading.
Like a colonial New England history book that cites a law about rationing during a war. It prohibited cakes, pastries, etc. — except wedding cakes. This was cited in the law on marriage on the immense importance of weddings.
Or a work on the lead curse tablets of the Roman Empire. Discussing a find in a temple spring of a large number of “prayers for vengeance”, he mentions that all of them are for trivial thefts, that would only injure a very poor person, that all of them are in excellent handwriting, and that only two are in the same handwriting. He then concludes that practice was widely accepted so that the victims (probably slaves) could consult the temple authorities and have them do it for them.
I was told by one of my favorite teachers that the way to to do research for a short paper was:
1. Read the seminal work by the foremost authority on the subject.
2. Read the seminal work by his most vilified contemporary.
3. Look up the original sources that they both dismiss as useless/not scholarly/trivial.
Doesn’t always work but it usually did. And boy did I get a worm’s eye view of academia.
Yup. And I’d encourage people to nibble outside history proper, into geography, geology, archaeology. We tend to think of looking to archaeology et cetera for ancient history, but it’s also done a great deal for more modern periods, up through the late 19th century. And geography can give insights into why things were built or events happened in certain places, as long as you keep in mind that humans are as bad as beavers when it comes to reshaping their own habitats. As with secondary sources, the interpretation of finds can change over time, but the material discoveries tend to be sound.
And don’t skip the work done by genealogy folks, family histories and local histories, when you are looking for secondary sources. They’ve done a lot of detailed research on migrations and day-to-day living that historians (alas) tend to skip over because genealogists are not “professional” aka academic historians. But it’s the genealogists who helped push government agencies in the UK and Europe to digitize all sorts of records and make them available online.
Thanks for the nod to genealogists/family historians since that happens to be my hobby/training 🙂 One thing to note in looking at past documents is that there are two classifications of documents: Original vs Derivative and also Primary vs Secondary vs Tertiary. Original – made at the time of the event. Derivative – created from original sources – indexed, scanned, photocopied, etc. Primary/Secondary/Tertiary = Who was the source of information?
Some records can be combinations of several of these. A death record can be original record for creation at death, primary for the reporting of the death, but secondary for information about the person who died, for instance. Understanding things like that can help out in putting together information about the world and the time you are reading about. And it can help pick out biases and gaps in knowledge.
Oh, yes – definitely look at local and single-event historians. They offer tons of material. I think my most favorite local Texas historian is a now-deceased gentleman named Guido Ransleben. (No, I did NOT make that up.) He wrote a history of his home town, Comfort, Texas that was an absolute gold-mine, chock-full of gossipy details, such as how his great-great grandfather’s first wife ran off with a soldier from Fort Martin Scott (outside Fredericksburg), and ggg-father was so humiliated that he left Fredericksburg and moved to Comfort. And that the first public school-teacher was a very fat New Englander who was too lazy to switch the bad boys so he shot pebbles at them instead.
First hand accounts, memoirs, letters, first newspaper accounts … splendid stuff for building authentic lives of your characters.
When you have a choice — you often don’t — read as far down the social ladder as you can. Grant wrote memoirs about the Civil War. So did one of his aides. The later has more of the usual details about day to day life.
Exactly – for the good, gossipy and relatively obscure details of day-to-day … the more relatively obscure, the better!
“Well behaved women seldom make history,” the more realistic take.
Seriously, if I didn’t have my “cute thinks the kids did” book, would anybody have a clue what a 2010th housewife DID?!?!
Sigh. Hate that bumper sticker almost as much as war is not the answer. Well-behaved men seldom make history, either — but most of the ill-behaved women and men make no history worth noting outside of the police blotter.
How true.
And, at that — “Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books.”
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I would add an application of two familiar maxims: “With all your getting, get understanding” and “know yourself.” In particular, after you have learned a million strange things about the past, look at yourself. Which of your beliefs will be profoundly embarrassing to your great-grandchildren? Which of the organizations or causes or movements to which you belong or with you are affiliated will be considered historical failures or, even worse, completely forgotten? If you think on these things, you may at least be spared a little sanctimony and vainglory. (Of course, it’s also possible that some of your beliefs will seem incredibly prescient to your descendants, and some of your current activities will be acorns from which great oaks grow, but don’t bet on it.)
I knew I had gotten benefits from my reading the time I read a crit that complained that the princes are allowed to run free but the princesses are kept under careful guard and what sort of society does that — and my instant thought was, “A normal one.”
YES.
I read a review/comment about “The Phantom Enemy” in which some woman was complaining about the Princess’ elaborate costume which she claimed “prevented” the Princess from doing anything. I chuckled because I’d read that royalty/nobility wore elaborate clothing because it showed that they could afford it and afford the servants necessary to manage wearing the clothing. The clothing wasn’t to prevent the Princess from doing anything. It was to show that the Princess was wealthy. [Very Big Grin]
cough — how about those Chinese mandarins with their elaborately long fingernails? Clearly a demand they refrain from manual labor, probably pushed by the unions looking to reduce competition.
Oh.
Hmmm, where did I leave those nail clippers….
Very Big Grin
One thing I found fascinating about Spanish California was the white under-trousers. Not smallclothes, but white pants worn under your regular, darker trousers and that showed at the cuff. The reason? To show that you could afford a washerwoman to keep them clean. Very conspicuous consumption, if you know the local customs.
A lot of conspicuous consumption is subtle nowadays because there’s very little that it isn’t easy to ape cheaply.
You’re ruining my Zorro images here… although I guess that’d explain why the man changed to black for his outings. Having white pants cuffs flashing around would be an awfully conspicuous target.
(Although come to think of it, I think I have seen that in some of the Zorro flicks, probably on the hidalgos as you’d expect. Can’t remember which one/s. Costume directors can be fiends for authenticity if they think they can sneak it in.)
in the France of the musketeers your outer pants might be slit down the back, to show these pants. No, seriously. Same reason.
That’s new. I’ve heard of sleeves being slit to show off your shirt. . . .
Yeah, that was normal. The other fad was… short lived. But the idea made me giggle.
Yes. A while back, I read that, (paraphrased) “The Hoop-Skirted dress of the Southern Belle was a tool of the Patriarchy”. I thought, “Wasn’t it a way to show off their class and their wealth?”. I guess they didn’t even realize how they were being subjugated.
They were victims of false consciousness, just like everyone who claims to enjoy their lives, or fails to blame anyone else for their problems.
Part of it was that with the new Republican simplicity, men were no longer allowed to be such peacocks, so when women dropped the simplicity, they were the only ones who could display their families’ wealth.
Yup, and sometimes you can tell who’s been drinking deep from the Whig view of history in re: medieval stuff. I really like Christopher Nuttall’s plotting and characters and narration, but when he started hauling out “medieval people do X and Y” in his Schooled by Magic books, it threw me totally out of the story.
Yes, he did think that people dressed princesses a certain way to keep them from being touched while dancing. I wrote this up as worldbuilding for a totally different magic world, especially since they had medieval dancing in pairs that wasn’t pavanes and Venetian stuff.
But more to the point, he was another one that thought medieval people didn’t wash, medieval cities didn’t have sewers, blah blah blah, despite having everybody be survivors of an empire.
Of course, the winner for this week was a translation of Fairy Tail. Having previously translated something about past people as “Ancients,” they were stuck with talking about how 400 years ago was ancient times. Since the Fairy Tail anime features a fair number of characters who are several hundred years old, this is even funnier than it would be.
Actually, that just shows that those several hundred years old characters are perpetuating the usage of their youth. Ronald Hutton cited an early modern town reviving a festival that had been instituted within living memory, and prescribing that it be maintained after “ancient custom.”
Witness how Burke described what they did: “Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths, we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts.”
Ancient. In 1775.
Yep, Chris does go over-board with the “medieval” is a bad thing but some of it may be an over-reaction to those idiot stories where a woman willing to back in time to escape the “evils of technology”.
His female main character enjoys her new home in spite of the lack of technology not because of the lack of technology. [Smile]
Sorry I didn’t read this on the weekend. I broke away from the computer and stitched. I needed the break.
There’s also the need to get an authentic voice to things. Back a decade or so when I worked in a bookstore, there was a series in the children’s section that was fiction “diaries” of young folk in certain eventful time periods. I idly picked up the one during WWII, read a few pages, and thought, Nope, that’s not even close.
This is based on one transcription of a family diary and letter from a daughter and her mother in regards to a rather big event—the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as seen from Honolulu just around the bay. Full of minute detail and trivialities, it’s rich in setting and allusions and, importantly, without any sense of what’s going to happen next. The writers of that book (and presumably that series) didn’t have a clue how to convey that sense of time and place, and were spending too much time on the big picture stuff, when a youth or kid during that time period would focus on the immediate details. It didn’t feel like history. In fact, it didn’t even feel like good historical fiction. Pity. It’s a nice concept, but you need the real thing.
Those are the kinds of things that I don’t always notice consciously when they’re right, but I do very much appreciate. Pay attention to details, pay attention to perspective. Those are the things that, for a couple of examples, Larry and Sarah both work so hard to get right in their historical stuff (which effectively includes Magical Empires). They put real effort into learning it, so that writing it correctly becomes wu wei.
But you know all those Baen authors are just lazy, right-wing hacks! [/sarc]
I am lucky as a writer, I guess – for having a kind of mental ‘tick’ that makes it very, very easy for me to write ‘in period’. I’ve compared it to the ability that some people have of being able to pick up an accent, flawlessly. I can ‘load up’ on the style or period that I want to convey … and then I can go on for pages, and pages. Have to be careful, though – because sometimes it will guarantee hard going for a modern reader.
And there are supposedly ‘authentic’ historical novels which I fired across the room at high-velocity because they didn’t project any kind of period feel at all, especially in dialog. The worst offender … oh, never mind. It would make a long list, but the one which pops into mind was the first Maggie Hope WWII mystery novel. I gave it two stars and thought I was being rathr indulgent at that.