Do you have a fave book that shaped understanding of history?

[jcmaine72]

9. Yes, and ironically enough, it is a work of fiction.

Gore Vidal's "Burr". I read this novel as a teenager and it completely changed the way I viewed our nation's founders, especially George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and how I viewed the study of history itself.

History text books at the time tended to deify the founding fathers, especially the aforementioned Washington and Jefferson. Gore Vidal takes each down several pegs in his novel and helped show them (albeit a bit crudely at times) as the flawed human beings they really were, all through the eyes of Aaron Burr somewhat reimagined by Vidal as an equally flawed antihero.

Along with Burr, Vidal's other novels such as "Lincoln" and "1876", also helped shaped how I viewed the study of history as a discipline. No longer did I see history as merely being a dry and lifeless recitation of facts etched in equally dry and lifeless granite, but as something dynamic and assuredly open to the interpretations of those who have recorded and studied it through time. I became fascinated with the historiography behind the history.

At any rate, it seems odd in retrospect that a work of historical fiction would help turn me into the sort of person who sometimes obsesses over the historiographical veracity of the history books he reads.