Replay: Catherine Grace Katz shares Five Things She's Learned about Writing the History We Think We Know
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“It is the history we think we know so well that is the history that most needs to be reexamined. Sometimes this is because new sources come to light, revealing perspectives we did not know existed that suddenly illuminate the shadows that lie just beyond these well-trodden paths…. In other instances, it is because events in our own times spark fresh ideas about how to think about the past, and new technologies make it possible to reconstruct what has come before in tangible and immersive ways.”
– Catherine Grace Katz, Five Things I've Learned about Writing the History We Think We Know
Catherine Grace Katz is the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War, named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Publishers Weekly and one of the Best History Books of 2020 by the Telegraph. Here’s the first five minutes of our recent 90-minute class in which she shares the Five Things She’s Learned about how to uncover and share the stories that challenge our ideas of history.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing the History We Think We Know shares Catherine’s fresh perspective on history, explaining how writers go about reexamining well-known figures and events and focusing on hidden stories and experiences that have been overlooked. Her class explores also explores how historical perspectives evolve over time and the ways in which history’s ongoing narrative is always reflection of relationships and shared human experiences.
If you’re interested in history – and ways in which history gets written and revised with time – this class is for you.
Originally from Chicago, Catherine graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in History and received her MPhil in Modern European History from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge in 2014, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices under the supervision of Professor David Reynolds. After graduating, Catherine worked in finance in New York City before a very fortuitous visit to the bookstore in the lobby of her office in Manhattan led her to return to history and writing. She is currently pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.
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