Historical Fiction as Inspiration

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Meet our Contributor: 

Meet our Contributor: Dr. Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez is an assistant professor and the director of English Education at North Dakota State University, where she is living her dream, teaching Methods courses and Young Adult Literature and mentoring preservice English teachers. She is in her 16th year of teaching and loves it just as much now as she did on day one. She has taught and worked with pre- and in-service teachers in Montana (very rural), Arkansas (urban), Arizona (urban and rural), and, now, North Dakota (urban and rural). She has been a member of NCTE since 2008, and is a strong supporter of professional organizations like NCTE, its state affiliates, and ALAN. Her research interests include teacher education, rural teacher support, YAL, and methods of teaching reading. She can be reached at [email protected].

​Historical Fiction as Inspiration by Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez

Historical fiction as a genre has always been my favorite. Whether it was reading the Dear America diaries in middle school or the Philippa Gregory stories of the Tudors, I have always been in love with history and historical characters and using historical fiction to dive deeper into the reality of what really happened. I have loved using novels when I taught history. I love incorporating history when I teach novels, and I think that history and literature go together in a way that helps us much more deeply understand the past and how that past plays a role in our daily lives. 

​When I was planning my semester of Young Adult Literature, one of the things that I kept in mind was the feedback that I had received from previous students of the course, and one of the things they had said was they wanted more representation of LGBTQIA+ voices, so that was something I really focused on in recreating the syllabus for this year and in thinking of my choice book offerings. In addition, one of the other things I thought about was parts of history that I want students to be able to connect to that are much less known. One example of a text that I have used in each iteration of my YAL course is Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. This is a novel about a very little-known time in American history when orphans, young people from the East Coast, particularly New York City, were put on trains and shipped to the rest of the country, generally the Midwest, so that they would live “good Christian lives” and grow up to be contributing members of society. Orphan Train follows the story of Niamh as she goes through various iterations of lives, and I say “iterations” very purposefully because she is a different person each time she changes homes. Niamh’s story parallels the story of a young girl named Molly, who is experiencing foster care in the modern world. Students often have no idea about this era of American history, and it spurs conversations about how America thinks of children, the ideas of childhood and orphanhood, the foster care system, adoption, and so much more. Thus, it is truly worthwhile to incorporate this text, and, when I thought about the ways that Orphan Train opened our minds to that era of American history, I thought about my choice books. 

Every semester, we read four books as a whole class, and then we do two rounds of choice books. In each round, I have a theme. Last year, I chose novels in verse, and then let my ideas go from there. For the other round, the theme was young adult novels that represent various mental health issues. I used Kia Jane Richmond’s Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters as a way to deepen students’ reading of their novels. This year, I kept the mental health focus for choice book one, but I changed choice book two’s theme to historical fiction, and I chose these five books:

• Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse (female main character, 1930s, Oklahoma),
• Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Melinda Lo (female main character who is a lesbian, 1950s, San Francisco),
• Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two, by Joseph Bruchac (male main character, 1940s, overseas),
• Ashes of Roses, by Mary Jane Auch (female main character, early 1900s, New York City), and
• Ground Zero, by Alan Gratz (male and female main characters, 2001 and 2019, New York City and Afghanistan).

In these choices, I worked to vary time periods and voices as you can see in the parentheses above. 

When I introduced the books, I told students that I purposefully chose these novels because they introduce us to forgotten or lesser-known parts of American history. As I was planning the course, I wanted students to think more deeply about sacrifices of people in the past that give us the things that we have now. For example, when I was thinking of Ashes of Roses and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, I wanted students to think about the plight of workers and the things that union organizers, and also just average people, have done to bring rights to workers in this country, and how it's important to fight for those rights even today. Workers, including our students – most of whom are working full time jobs alongside being full time students – deserve to be treated like human beings. And they deserve to know that there are people out there fighting for that.

As a former history teacher, I know that eras like the Gilded Age and the Great Depression can be glossed over in favor of what some might term more interesting history, such as World Wars I and II. I am certain I was guilty of doing this myself when I taught history because, at the same time, I was also teaching the same students in my ELA courses. So, if I glossed over the Gilded Age in junior history class, I could cover it in Junior English when we read The Great Gatsby, and I did. I was lucky to have two class periods with the same students to work with both the literature and history of different time periods. But not every history or English teacher is as lucky as I was to have that kind of time with the material.

Now, in today's world, I really want students to take a deep dive into the Gilded Age; I want students to take a deep dive into the Great Depression and begin to think about the political, social, and economic reasons behind those two eras. I want them to think about how those eras are interconnected and to spark their interest in the people who came before them. Novels like Ashes of Roses and Out of the Dust bring students into the lives of regular people who lived and worked in big cities in early America and rural areas in the 1930s. 

For me, my grandparents lived through the Great Depression. My grandfather was a World War II veteran and a prisoner of war, but my students’ grandparents weren't; they're too young for that. According to Diana Paolitto, a Harvard psychologist, teenagers have a difficult time perceiving a “past unless they knew someone who had lived at that time,” so we may be able to assume that students in their teens and early 20s can conceive of a past as far back as the 1950s (Nilsen et al., 261). My students were born after 9/11, so my goal was to bring them into the spaces of people for whom, unlike me, they may have no reference. 

​One of the reasons I chose Ground Zero by Alan Gratz is that, for my students, their whole lives we've been at war, and it's become ubiquitous, and, thus, at the same time, quite forgettable. I was 15 when 9/11 happened, my school experienced a bomb threat the day afterwards, half the guys I graduated with, and the girls, too, joined the National Guard, or one of the various other branches of service. We were in a military town with an air force base just up the road, and it was very real for us, and it continues to be, as I watch my friends struggle with PTSD and things of that nature that stem from their deployments. The Middle East and the conflicts there were so present for people in my generation. For students now, though, this is something they have lived with their whole lives, and it has almost become background noise. A novel like Ground Zero turns up the volume and makes the actual people affected by these events present in the students’ lives. 

I want students to connect with the people in these instances, and that is something that historical fiction does really well as a genre.

Historical fiction must be historically accurate and “steeped in time and place” (Nilson et al., 258). This genre can include mystery, suspense, romance, adventure, and more as long as it maintains historical accuracy. These novels provide readers with “a sense of history’s continuity” and the idea that each era of history is deeply connected to those that came before and those that come after (258). Historical Fiction generally presents readers with a nuanced view of the time and place the characters are in. Sometimes it might be easy to clearly define “good guys” and “bad guys” in these novels, but, often, these authors work to show the moral gray areas that people in past times experienced, just as we do now. 

But its deeper purpose is to connect us with those in the past, to be able to put ourselves in situations and say, “Would I have done that? Would I have hidden someone? Would I have undermined an evil king? Would I have fought for workers’ rights? Would I have done any number of things?” Young people (and adults, too!) use novels to practice choices, and doing that in the novel is much safer than doing it in real life. Historical Fiction provides us with the opportunity to say, “If I had been there, what would I have done?” And I think that encourages us at the same time to say, “What should I be doing today, in this historical moment? What choices should I be making that will be remembered by people who come after me?” 

Not just students, but teachers, too, are going about their daily lives because we're busy and we have things to do and families to raise, but we forget that just one person can have a huge effect on the world around them. The novel Orphan Train illustrates this truth completely, as do the other novels mentioned in this piece. A kindness from a coworker, some food from a stranger, a teacher who listens to and believes Niamh. Every single person has a role to play. 

What made me think this deeply about this topic was reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry this year. I know I read it at least 10 times when I was growing up, but I decided to reread it this year to prepare for a training provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “Exploring Holocaust Literature in the Classroom.” Number the Stars is a short but powerful novel written for elementary to middle grade readers. It details the story of Annemarie, a young Danish girl who must become brave in the face of danger in order to save her best friend. In the background, we see how the entire country of Denmark came together to resist oppression in myriad ways. Lois Lowry has a way of bringing us in and helping us live the lives of the people that she is presenting. One of the key things for me as I reread this novel was Annemarie doesn't know. She only knows that something bigger than her is out there. She knows that her best friend needs her, and that maybe her parents are doing something bigger than themselves, and all she can do is help, fight through the fear, and do her absolute best. 

And that absolutely struck me in 2025, because, each day, as we make our regular day-to-day choices and live our regular day-to-day lives, we also can make, perhaps, bigger choices. We can give in to despair; we give in to any number of things on a bad day, but we also can make the choice to do our best and to fight through the fear and to acknowledge that there are bigger things than us happening around us that we can be part of, even with the smallest of actions. We don't have to be the ones running the Danish Resistance, but we could be the person who provides a meal for one of them. We don't have to be the fisherman who's taking Jewish people from Denmark to Sweden, but we could be the person who runs the handkerchief. It is so important for us to remember that in these times and to be inspired. 

When I was a young person, these Historical Fiction books helped me develop a sense of justice, a sense of being, a sense of identity. I constantly was thinking, “Who would I have been in those times? Who do I want to be in these times?” Rereading Number the Stars felt like such a key moment in my year, because it's a book that I have thought about many times in the past 30 years, but the actual physical act of rereading it reminded me of the ideals that I had as an eight or nine year old when I read it the first time, reminded me of the deep sense of justice that has guided me into being the type of person that I want to be. 

​That deep sense of justice, that feeling that, as Byron Graves says, “When you're a teen, everything is everything,” i.e. every small thing means the world, is important to remember because, sometimes, as an adult, everything is everything. Any small thing that we do could be everything to somebody else. We are so deeply interconnected, and the people who come after us are counting on us to remember that. 

Number the Stars helped remind me of my place in this world and the type of person that I wanted to be, the type of person that I am, the type of person that I hope to be as I move forward, and Historical Fiction as a genre is inspiring in that way. So as we move into the holiday season and the time of year when we wish that there were peace on earth, when we think deeply about the ways we put others before ourselves, let's remember our sense of justice, the type of people that we wanted to be when we were reading books like Number the Stars growing up, and the type of people that we can still be now. And let’s remember that helping our neighbors doesn't take that much work. Annemarie performed a seemingly small act – carrying the handkerchief – but her work made all the difference. 

Works Cited:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses. Henry Holt and Company, 2002, New York City.

Baker Kline, Christina. Orphan Train. William Morrow, 2013, New York City.

Bruchac, Joseph. Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two. SPEAK, 2005, New York City.  

Gratz, Alan. Ground Zero. Scholastic, Inc., 2021, New York City.

Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. Scholastic, Inc., 1997, New York City.

Lo, Melinda. Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Dutton Books, 2021, New York City.

Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989, New York City.

Nilsen, Alleen Pace, et al. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. 9th ed., Pearson, 2014, Boston.
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Richmond, Kia Jane. Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters. ABC – CLIO, LLC., 2019, Santa Barbara, CA.
 
Note** The Dear America diaries, which includes more than 40 books, were published by Scholastic, Inc. https://www.scholastic.com/teachdearamerica/published_allBooks.htm