Past, Present & Future THE
2014 R E P ORT F ROM T H E DE PA RT M E N T OF H I STORY
Telling Stories with Writer-in-Residence Adam Hochschild Each year the Department of History brings a writer of national prominence to campus for a weeklong residency to enliven the training of our students in writing for a range of audiences and venues. In March the Department of History and the Five College community welcomed award-winning writer Adam Hochschild, whose works include King Leopold’s Ghost, Bury the Chains, and To End All Wars. Hochschild is a writer as well as a lecturer in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. During his stay Hochschild visited several Five College classes, including our graduate seminar “Writing History.” “One of the most important lessons we learned from Hochschild’s visit,” reports M.A. student Matthew Herrera, “was his approach to writing history for popular audiences. He told us that his goal as a writer was to captivate the reader. Hochschild believes that in order to reach wider audiences, historians need to use the classic tools writers have been using for hundreds of years, such as narrative devices of plot and scene-setting. Writing that makes use of these techniques appeals to audiences outside of academia, and using these in works that expand the field can only have a positive influence.” On 28 March, Hochschild delivered the Writer-in-Residence lecture, “Rewriting the Spanish Civil War,” to an enthusiastic crowd. He focused on his latest project, a history of American volunteer fighters in the Spanish Civil War. Hochschild described the book and his research and writing processes. In order to make history more believable and personal, he recommended framing narrative through a handful of characters with whom readers can connect and through whom the story can be told. “History, after all, doesn’t happen in the abstract,” Hochschild argued. “It happens to individual people.” For his sage advice on how to integrate literary methods into history in ways that all audiences can appreciate as well as for his congenial conversation and company, we thank Adam Hochschild for a full and valuable week. Adam Hochschild.