What can we learn from reenactors?

Technology tip:  Living historian and reenactor groups, like good historical novelists, try to be as honest as they can in portraying their characters, and we can learn much from them.  They have studied everything about the period of history they portray, right down to the material from which their buttons are made.

The web page of a group devoted to the Middle Ages can be found at http://www.sca.org/

The Civil War Reenactors home page is

http://www.cwreenactors.com/index.php

Reenactor.net at http://www.reenactor.net/

is a site that includes reenactor groups from ancient times to the present.

Avoid anachronisms in dialogue

A couple of weeks ago, someone on one of my historical fiction listservs asked if anyone out there knew when the term “smelling himself” as in “full of oneself” came about. The writer was afraid of an anachronism in a piece of dialogue she was creating for a historical novel. Someone on the listserv suggested that she try putting the phrase into Google’s N gram viewer.

According to the website, when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. You can find plenty of examples at the sites info link.

This free tool strikes me as useful for writers who want to be sure their idiomatic expressions used in dialogue are authentic to the period about which they are writing. Or perhaps you are wondering what year a certain object came into use. I tried an experiment with “seatbelt” and found that the term came into use in print (at least in the books Google searched) about 1960. You can run your own experiment at the site.

Researching for authentic historical details

Authentic details help to develop historical characters in the minds of readers. Sometimes, for example, my historical characters need to have dialogue about what is happening in their world. At other times, they may need to be reading a book or listening to music.  

I have a pretty good nondigital source for finding cultural details in history, called The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, by Bernard Grun, based on Werner Stein’s Kulturfahrplan. The source begins with the year 5000 BC and progresses to 1978. In table form, it gives snippets of important people and events in the categories of History and Politics; Literature and Theater; Religion, Philosophy and Learning; Visual Arts; Music; Science and Technology; and Daily Life. So, if I have a character living in 1863 who loves to read and listen to music, I can very quickly determine what the literature and musical trends of that year would have been.

But wait!  This blog is about writing historical fiction in the digital age.  Here is a link to the U.S. Library of Congress site called This Day in History that gives information about events and people of the past according to exact date.  There are even links for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” Of course, this source is limited to recorded history from the Library of Congress, but here you will find links to the primary resources (images and documents) associated with U. S. history.  For example, on this day in 1778, the Treaty of Alliance between the U. S. and France was signed in Paris.