I talk to gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist, too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor…. Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness

I have, dear reader, engaged you in a small deception. I have led you down a false path, pulled the wool over your eyes, lied. Though the phantom time hypothesis is unfortunately real, I have never, as I claimed, encountered a true believer myself; the misfortune of that encounter fell upon a former adviser. Why? As any merely competent writer will tell you, a personal anecdote is a quick and dirty way of immediately building trust and engagement with an audience. I didn’t have one to hand, and so I lied.

The veracity of who encountered a conspiracy theorist—or even if anyone did at all—has no bearing on the scope of the argument I made, nor the logic at work behind it. This sort of white lie is a victimless crime, or perhaps, lacking a victim, it is no crime at all. And as Ursula K. Le Guin knew well, some truths need to be communicated through lies. When this is done particularly well by a writer, we usually refer to the result as “literature.”

(By the way, bringing an audience behind the scenes, admitting to an author’s artifice and narrator’s unreliability, is a literary method of building trust and rapport. Perhaps I am lying about lying. Does it matter? )

You will, I hope, forgive my mendacity—no harm, no foul, right? But if you do, it begs the asking of a question: where does the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable falsehoods lie? That is, many (most?) historians have been trained to an exacting level of fidelity to fact . That former adviser, for example, the one who actually encountered the phantom time hypothesist, once told me that he would evaluate whether a given historian’s attention to detail—and thus their work—could be trusted by their adherence to the style guide in their footnotes . If they omitted the occasional semicolon demanded by the Chicago Manual, he could have no faith that they had not missed some pen stroke in their primary source which would reverse the meaning of the entire text. With such strict standards, any sort of futzing with the truth for rhetorical purposes seems flat-out unacceptable.

But as my examination of neomedievalism, dirtbag historicism, and conspiracy theorists has shown, it is often convenient to many to confuse history with nostalgia and fact with story; the space between the concepts is smaller than we historians often feel comfortable admitting. History is, at its core, a narrative of identity . The stories we tell about who we were can reveal who we are and who we wish to be. Academic historians privilege a certain subgenre of these stories based on what they understand to be fact, but as Le Guin reminds us, fact is not superior to fiction as a method of arriving at truth . More recent authors writing in a more literary vein of fantasy concur. Neil Gaiman, who readily admits Le Guin’s influence on his own work, places these words in the mouth of one of his characters: “They are using reason as a tool. Reason. It is no more reliable a tool than instinct, myth or dream.” Although this character is talking about Enlightenment science, he could just as easily have been talking about history .

That idea, I hear you cry, is from literature; what has it to do with history? Like the boundary between history and nostalgia, the space between history and literature is smaller than we some historians often feel comfortable admitting. After all, the practice of history rests at the crossroads of the social sciences and the humanities. It is often more story-driven than the former and more evidence-driven than the latter, though in all cases the tails of the bell curves overlap significantly. When we are asked what the difference is between history based in contemporary identity politics and sociology, political science, or ethnic studies, the answer is: nothing except a different perspective . That’s as it should be.

The use of literary style, trope, and motif to write history at the expense of hard fact is far from new. When Eben Horsford built “Viking” towers and monuments to Leif Erikson in Boston, he was doing precisely this sort of history. It remains one of the defining features of the histories consumed most ravenously in the public sphere. “Audiences,” as Tom Stoppard wrote in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, “know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.” Fitting messy reality into cunningly shaped boxes—storytelling—is what people expect from historians, and that is what they are prepared to believe in from us.

So that’s it, then? Three thousand words all to say we should be lying more when we write, just like they did in the 19th century? Well, yes, more or less. Guilty as charged. Crafting compelling, aesthetically pleasing, or even literary histories is a vital skill, but it is a skill which is insufficiently delineated, described, or discussed, either during one’s PhD or after, with few exceptions. I will bet that whether it was acceptable or unacceptable to start a piece with a false anecdote, or how one might do so, never made it into your writing seminar syllabus, if you even had a writing seminar at all . Which types of details one might omit or gloss over for the benefit of narrative cohesion and reader interest is not a subject discussed with conference roundtables .

They should be. The ability to weave research into a compelling narrative is one of the strongest and most applicable talents a recent PhD looking for a job outside academia can bring to the table . Moreover, deliberately training historians in affecting and manipulating an audience—in fiction writing and rhetoric—helps us become better communicators in a politically charged environment. Either as a cause or as a result of the absence of this training, a history education in the US is not seen, as it is elsewhere, as a stepping-stone to public office. I was never taught how to use my hard-won expertise to convince a school board to do the right thing, for example, an oversight which I am now working to correct .

Communicating the past and its continuing resonances with the present to all audiences, academic or not, is what historians do. With history itself as our guide, it’s time we reevaluated the tools we need to do that job well.