Sample Creative Writing Assignments for Honors Students

Sample Creative Writing Assignments from Honors Classes
and for upper level and graduate history classes
The purpose of these assignments is to better learn the techniques historians use for studying the past and to explore issues in the philosophy of history. In order to write these assignments, students must consider the langauge, customs, and historical events associated with an era, and the literary, philosophical, political and historical works which are available to the historian. The student attempts to enter the mind of the past through reconstructing the life of a hypothetical historical figure. After competing the assignment, students should then assess various schools of thought on the philosophy of history. Is it really possible, as Robin Collingwood has claimed, to "get into the mind" of historical figures of the past? Is human nature "always and everywhere the same" as Thucydides claimed? Finally, students should be prepared to discuss the problems they encountered in researching and writing their assignments. For further information, consult my article "Creative Writing and The Historian: An Active Learning Model for Teaching the Craft of History," The History Teacher November 1996.

The Life of an Egyptian Woman by Emily Tarasenko
An Imaginative, Posthumous Autobiography of Thutmosis III by William Dunning
Jean Calvin
a creative "autobiography" by Cathy Locks, a graduate student at GC&SU, for an oral presentation in HIST 515: Renaissance and Reformation

Sample Creative Writing Assignments from Honors Classes and for upper level and graduate history classes

Sample Creative Writing Assignments from Honors Classes
and for upper level and graduate history classes