What I like about narrative history is the story of a person in the past. I find someone I can identify with, someone whose life intrigues me, a life that I wish to relive, as it were, re-create. I love to read memoirs, diaries, letters, and other personal reflections into a person’s feelings, beliefs, and soul. Often, when these sources are sparing, I rely on empathy, the ability to make sense of a person, of a past time, to use imagination to feel the past, feel what really happened. As I research and imagine, and visit the places where people once lived, I can sense the past and write what I believe is an accurate portrayal of what once was.

This approach to history is completely different from the modern professional approach to history as it developed during the past two centuries. Contemporary historical thought has been influenced by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century history in emerging universities became a professional, academic endeavor. Historians began to believe that history is a scientific rendering of patterns of human behavior.

Rather, I believe history is the attempt to recover from the past the exact feelings and mentality that the historical person was feeling and thinking. I try to resurrect the past, to empathize with past people, to look at them not from the benefit of my or my society’s values, rather to look at them from the perspective of their own time. I am not a judge of the past. Rather, I want as much as possible to discover an unbiased human experience of a past time.

In this endeavor I find the last verse of the Gospel of John so important.

John wrote: “Now, there are many other things that Jesus did. If they were all written down one by one, I suppose that the whole world could not hold the books that would be written.” The implication in this passage is that Jesus impacted–impacts–each life, “one by one,” and that if we could tell the story of how he has impacted each life, the billions upon billions, that there would be too many books–indeed an infinite number!

Each book I write, no matter if it is someone famous, like John Smith, or someone hardly anyone has heard about, like my grandfather Claude Largent, follows the same approach: that God had a plan for this person, that they lived their live according to God’s plan, and I as a historian will try to recreate this plan at the particular time and place in which the person lived. My biographies become one of John’s hypothetical books about one of billions upon billions of lives that God through His grace and mercy has created in this universe of His—and we get to share it!