It Takes Two: Combining English and History to Team Teach Narrative Writing

Scott W Berg, Zachary M Schrag
2021 Journal of American History  
Zachary was a historian who wanted to become a better writer, teaching students who had been drawn to history by a love of exciting stories and who often wished for the chance to write their own. Scott was a writer who wanted to become a better historian but who also wanted to encounter students with a curiosity for genres of creative writing outside of fiction, poetry, and memoir. We worked in the same building at George Mason University-Zach in the history department on the third floor, Scott
more » ... in the English department one flight up-and over the years we had many conversations about our shared love of narrative history, of books written by the popular historians Adam Hochschild, Richard Holmes, Dava Sobel, and Barbara Tuchman. These were books that sold well, that entertained, that taught, but that rarely appeared in either history courses or English courses. We agreed about some, we-ahem-disagreed about others. When Scott held up his copy of Homer Hoyt's One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (a source for his upcoming narrative history about the aftermath of the great Chicago fire of 1871) and said, "I mean, some kinds of history just can't be written through narrative," Zach answered, "Oh, but they can! They all can!" As proof, Zach pointed to our shared admiration for William Cronon, who had majored in both English and history, and who, in Nature's Metropolis somehow told a gripping story about the evolution of midwestern lumber wholesaling, hog butchering, and grain storage. 1 We imagined teaching together a big-tent course that would welcome undergraduates and graduate students from both English and history. By bringing the two disciplines together, we hoped to draw on the strengths of each, combining the interpretive questions and research methods of the historian with the craft of the writer. "The human need for storytelling is not likely ever to go away," argues Cronon. "It is far too basic to the way Scott W.
doi:10.1093/jahist/jaaa468 fatcat:7ddubqm2yrbbzfvc6vmaroypnu