historical fiction

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time.

Attribution can make visible the vast infrastructure of research and display how much hard-won knowledge, including creative endeavor, it has faciliated.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow will be no better.

How American Girl transformed the doll world—and why millennials love it so.

Coming to terms with Boston’s racist legacy in “Small Mercies."

The uses and abuses of history through the "diary" of Thomas Fallon.

History classes made it seem like young girls wouldn't ever change the course of the world. These books taught them that they could.

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia.

Is it possible to write a good Civil War romance?

In Coates's debut novel, he sets out to recover the struggles for emancipation that have been lost to the past.

An interview with Taylor Brown, author of the novel "Rednecks."

From 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' to 'We Were the Lucky Ones,' a new wave of Holocaust dramas feel surprisingly shallow.

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

A new television miniseries depicts the pursuit of Lincoln’s killer. But the public appetite for tales about the chase began even as it was happening.

A conversation with Jill Lepore about the past decade — “a time that felt like a time, felt like history.”

Though his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer eventually eclipsed him, Israel Joshua Singer excelled at showing characters buffeted by the tides of history.

In every generation, writers and readers find new ways to plumb the depths of Herman Melville and his work.

The Max series makes a radical argument for what constitutes American history.

On Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”

James McBride’s new novel tells a story of solidarity between Black and Jewish communities.