Mistakes I Dare Not Admit

History Unclassified’s first special edition is dedicated to mistakes. That is fitting because History Unclassified began in failure and rejection. In 2017, Kate Brown submitted a screenplay to the American Historical Review. It was not necessarily a good play, but it was all history, footnoted with newly-unearthed archival sources. Why, Kate asked, does history in the AHR generally appear in the same format? Why can’t, for example, nonfiction take fictional form? She found the format of a screenplay useful to narrate actions that occurred in different times and places simultaneously on stage. The stage helped frame the Chernobyl tragedy more reliably than chronology, she argued, because one effect of radioactive contaminants was to both slow time and speed it up. The readers rejected the play, but what was meant as a provocation started a conversation between Kate and Alex Lichtenstein, then AHR editor, and led to the launch of the History Unclassified section in June 2018.

Conversation · Frame (networking) · Provocation test · Section (typography) · Tragedy (event) · Educational Leadership and Practices · Legal Cases and Commentary · Legal principles and applications