By Joseph Horowitz

From Peter Quinn’s Civil War New York to Dvorak’s New World, imagined lives can deepen our understanding of the past — and restore the arts to the teaching of history.

Quite suddenly, the writing and teaching of American history have become an exigent topic, both on the left and the right. What might be the timeliest strategies for studying and imparting the history of the United States? How best to teach history in high schools and colleges?

I newly ponder these questions having just read a majestic “novel of Civil War New York”: Peter Quinn’s Banished Children of Eve (1994). Quinn’s topic is New York’s draft riots of 1863. My knowledge of this event had been scant: I knew that Irish-Americans hostile to African-Americans had violently opposed Civil War conscription. Quinn’s treatment is capacious but indirect. There is no “story.” Rather, he tracks the activities of a dozen residents of roiling Manhattan, mostly Irish, and also delves into their origins in impoverished Ireland. The riots are understood as an inescapable wartime consequence transcending individual agency. I have never read a more instructive American history book.

Only two of Quinn’s main characters — the composer Stephen Foster and Archbishop John Hughes — are historical. The others, including a star blackface minstrel and a mixed-race actress in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are invented yet representative. By comparison, E. L. Doctorow’s admirable sequence of novels exploring episodes of the American narrative, while equally vivid in its re-creation of time and place, superimposes plots that risk blurring the grand lines of cultural memory.

I come to Quinn having in recent years written a couple of historical novels of my own: The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age and The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. These are kindred exercises returning to stories I have told as “fact.” The necessity of putting words into the mouths of the Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl and of Gustav and Alma Mahler proved revelatory. Via impersonation, I learned things about my real-life actors I had not previously gleaned.

In fact, I have come to regard historical fiction as a vital tool for the cultural historian. Unlike Quinn’s novel or those of Doctorow, mine are exclusively populated by characters who actually lived and died. And the incidents I recreate actually transpired. Perhaps the genre I attempt could be called “creative nonfiction.” In any event, I have become keenly aware that “historical fiction” and “history” span an unbroken continuum. The incidents and people at hand must be embellished and interpreted — and this contextualization can take many forms.

It can also broach different genres. Martin Scorsese’s meticulously detailed Gangs of New York (2002) features the same draft rioters who inhabit Peter Quinn’s novel — and devolves into a bloody melodrama. Ken Burns’s TV documentaries artfully animate historical events. But these acclaimed films — and films in general (unless silent) — do not, in my experience, invite as personalized a response as books. Books require more of an exercise of imagination. When Quinn describes the lynching of a young African-American he’s tracked for 300 pages, I have to stop reading. There is no stopping a film.

That is: Quinn’s dogged account of the hunting, taunting, and mutilation of an innocent victim of prejudice is ultimately envisioned by the reader, not the author. It engenders a cumulative visceral experience not to be acquired from a movie, or scattershot via AI and the internet. For that matter, any number of readers and reviewers of my novel about the Mahlers in New York testify that they’ve acquired a newly compassionate understanding of Gustav’s controversial spouse. Certainly that was my own experience imagining Alma’s response to new challenges posed by a new environment.

Might historical fiction also prove a vital resource for the educator? Might it speak to today’s high school and college students, riddled with ever-shorter attention spans? Might it instill an interest in the creative word?

My first attempt at historical fiction, back in 2003, was a short book for young adults: Dvorak in America. My goal was to inspire social studies teachers to sneak the arts into the classroom by a back door.

During his three-year sojourn in the United States (1892–1895), Antonin Dvorak proved a musical de Tocqueville. Challenged to distinguish what most defined the New World versus the Old, he came up with three seminal attributes: Native Americans in danger of extinction, African Americans once enslaved, and a vast American West he found both melancholic and majestic. He inscribed these impressions in the most famous, most beloved symphony ever composed on American soil: “From the New World,” premiered by Anton Seidl’s New York Philharmonic in 1893.

Dvorak also issued a landmark prophecy: that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of American classical music. (Instead, they would foster popular musical genres known the world over.) He grasped that the sorrow songs of the South were (as W. E. B. Du Bois would put it a decade later) “the spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.” For an assistant, Dvorak hired a young African-American from Erie, Pennsylvania. This was Harry Burleigh, who would become the key player in turning spirituals into concert songs. Dvorak was fascinated by the most popular nineteenth-century American literary text: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha — which inspired many a passage in his New World Symphony. He apparently attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He spent three weeks observing the itinerant Kickapoo Medicine Show in Spillville, Iowa. He attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His employer at New York City’s National Conservatory of Music, Jeannette Thurber, successfully enticed Black students with free tuition. In 1894, at the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, Dvorak conducted the school’s interracial orchestra and an all-Black chorus in a program including his own transcription of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home”; the soloists were Burleigh and the premier Black concert soprano of her time: Sissieretta Jones. The concert was ingeniously publicized by the supreme exponent of yellow journalism: James Creelman, whose subsequent on-site reportage would influence the Spanish-American War and the Mexican Revolution. Dvorak’s advocates also included Henry Krehbiel, the dean of New York’s music critics, who wrote a pivotal book-length study of “African-American Folk Songs.” Upon visiting Boston, however, Dvorak was denounced as a “negrophile”: a tale of two cities. He returned to Prague when Mrs. Thurber’s husband was knocked out by the Panic of 1893.

Inhabiting these formidable people and events for young readers, my little Dvorak in America book produced a personal epiphany. I had already written extensively about Dvorak’s and Seidl’s New York, had already spent years digging into archives to fathom Seidl’s New World fate. Hypothetically situating Seidl and Dvorak at the round table of Fleischmann’s Café (their daily Union Square hangout), I discovered I could hear Seidl speak.

“Incidentally, I have been looking at your new symphony. The second movement.”

Dvorak bristled.

“It is a slow movement, nein?” said Seidl.

Dvorak exhaled a gust of cigar smoke.

“Andante, you call it,” Seidl continued in his low, steady voice. “But I am sure that it is slower. A Largo. That is to get underneath, to the inner meaning. The Innigkeit.” . . .

Dvorak confronted Seidl’s gaze. “No one can sing so slowly,” he said. “Burleigh . . .”

“Ja! Ja! Burleigh!” Seidl snorted and glanced away. “This is not Burleigh. This is Heimweh — homesickness. Your ‘New World’ Symphony is an ‘Old World’ Symphony. Negro music, Indian music, it is all very fine. It is what the Americans call window dressing. It is not the heart of this music. Your heart — is it in New York? Or in Bohemia?”

Seidl pointed at his chest. Dvorak ordered another Pilsner. Minutes passed.

“Do as you please,” said Dvorak.

Seidl lifted his watch from his pocket. “I must rehearse,” he said, and left the table.

I subsequently enjoyed opportunities to deploy the Dvorak/America story in various settings, most memorably at the Boston Latin School during a brief stint on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. I also had occasion, in 2010, to lead a “Dvorak and America” NEH Teacher-Training Institute — a three-week exercise hosting 30 high school teachers from around the nation. The participants included a teacher from a Dallas private school who happened to be part of the team overseeing the Advanced Placement American History curriculum. He informed me that the AP curriculum included no music. He subsequently proposed that a day be set aside for the Dvorak/New World story. His proposal failed.

That was sixteen years ago — when a crisis in humanities education was not yet widely decried.

Marian Anderson sings “The Star Spangled Banner” at the dedication of a mural commemorating her free public concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. Photo: Wikimedia

My confidence in historical fiction as a tool for the scholar is by now a boundless conviction. But I’m not sure what pertinence it may have to present-day pedagogy. What I do know is that transcending the STEM curriculum has never been more imperative — and that linking history to music, literature, and the visual arts is a necessary opportunity. It’s a truism that the arts — and participation in the arts, and learning about the arts — do not require “practical” justification. And yet I have no doubt that the arts are empowering. They power individual self-knowledge and communal self-knowledge. Not least, they are morally empowering.

This last claim fell into disfavor over the course of the twentieth century. It needs to be revisited. Dvorak, Seidl, and their New World adherents took it for granted. For them, it supported a posture of empathic understanding.

The most iconic vignette of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral train shows a weeping Navy accordionist named Graham Jackson. He is playing the spiritual “Goin’ Home” — for FDR’s sad return to Hyde Park. One of the things the story of Dvorak in America teaches is that this familiar tune is not quoted in the Largo of the New World Symphony. Rather, it’s a melody Dvorak himself composed in the style of the spirituals Harry Burleigh sang for him. His pupil Harry Rowe Shelley, for whom he first played it, testified that Dvorak shared “the immortal theme with great passion and fervor, his eyes bulging out, his blood purple red in the neck veins, his whole body vibrating.” Another Dvorak pupil, William Arms Fisher, added the words eighteen years following Dvorak’s death. After that, “Goin’ Home” was famously sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson — names, I have discovered, no longer known even to African-American undergraduates.

However imparted, this tale is one today’s students of American history deserve to know. It opens a back door that some may choose to enter.

Joseph Horowitz’s blog is The Unanswered Question. His website is www.josephhorowitz.com