Narrative Craft
Historians are storytellers; they tell the past. They take facts and turn them into meaning. Historians interpret evidence in order to explain ideas, power, and people. Investigating the past is not easy, as you know, because it was written by the victors, but Historians keep digging. That’s not enough. We start with evidence, not necessarily what is known or the conclusion of a war. We look for patterns, oddities, silences, the one tiny sentence that shifts in an unexpected way. We are the detectives of the world. The nonfiction writers who bring history forward. What is taught in grade school rarely changes, but we keep pushing. You can always find an alternative history. Most historians do not write textbooks that cover the United States from its founding to the present, but rather focus on a field and a question about a specific time, place, person, office, etc. We then craft these into digestible books around 200-300 pages, sometimes longer. Readers and learners want stories, not facts, from textbooks. The job of a historian is to craft that into a story you want to read. Narrative craft means shaping information into a story by finding a clear structure that makes it compelling. It isn’t about embellishing the facts, but about uncovering structure, purpose, and meaning.
Facts come from primary documents, with occasional use of secondary documents as needed. Historians work in archives, digging for patterns that may not have been noticed before. They dig in the dirt to see how a person may have lived 200 years ago. Evidence gives an outline, and Historians create the story it tells. It starts with curiosity, asking a question, seeing where the evidence takes you, and then creating a structure. I start chapters or essays with a story, a photo description, or a quote, then provide evidence. Don’t be confused; I’m not saying we take stories and find what makes them work. We find the stories in the archives, dirt, etc. I started my dissertation with a story rooted in facts:
A suggestion in a December 1938 letter sparked a chain of events that greatly influenced US diplomatic relations with Latin America during World War II. Beardsley Ruml, the author of the letter, was a prominent public policy advisor and businessman who was well established in government circles.[1] He served on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s planning board in 1935 before becoming director of the Federal Reserve of New York in 1937.[2] Ruml sent a congratulatory letter to Harry Hopkins upon his new appointment as Secretary of Commerce. In the letter, he suggested a meeting: “If you are to be in New York soon, I think it would be well worth while for you to spend about two hours at leisure with Nelson Rockefeller.”[3]
A small opening sparked the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. A mention in a letter led to a wartime office ensuring the Good Neighbor Policy was not just theoretical—it became action. The OCIAA promoted inter-American cooperation. The letter offers more excitement and urgency than simply stating that the OCIAA began in 1941. Historians visit archives with questions sparked by curiosity, such as, “Why doesn’t anyone look at these pamphlets?” or “How did a wartime office work with museums?” From there, I start tracing the narrative arc hidden in the material. Training guides me: begin at the start, find key points and problems, then let the story take shape. This is structure, not embellishment. I cannot guess, but I can state what reprints suggest about popularity. Balance and limits guide interpretation.
In addition to balance and limits, you have to tell the story compellingly to the right audience. If I’m writing a book where the audience is professors and their graduate students, I can use a certain amount of academic jargon. I can provide a full chapter on something that helped set up the rest. For mass-market nonfiction, a random chapter on the spy’s father may not be important. You may lose your readers. For academics, it’s important to show that history, if it shaped the spy. A chapter for one book may not work in another. The narrative craft is not performance; it’s explaining and sharing. Historians shape how people see and understand the world, and often where they are in it.
[1] Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958 (Doubleday, 1996, 174, https://archive.org/details/lifeofnelsonaroc00reic/page/174/mode/2up.
[2] “Beardsley Ruml,” Rockefeller Archive Center, accessed November 10, 2025, https://dimes.rockarch.org/agents/6jJX3BGcDGFY5E3ZBiUYSU?inheritRedirect=false.
[3] Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958, 174.
Wendi Kavanaugh 
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