“It’s like the narrator is African societies and the physician is the European powers during and after the Berlin Conference,” a sophomore in my AP World History class said during a discussion about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1891 short story The Yellow Wallpaper. “The narrator begins the story as mostly reliable and normal. She only becomes unreliable after the ‘rest cure’ is imposed on her by an outside force, like how the lines drawn at the Berlin Conference led to the destabilization of Africa.”
Another student noted that the physician behaves as though he knows what is best for the narrator as he goes against her will, much like the “civilizing missions” Europeans claimed to carry out across the world in the 19th century.
I asked my students to read The Yellow Wallpaper as part of a Socratic seminar on 19th-century imperialism––even though the story has nothing directly to do with imperialism. Though written in the same era, it is a story about gender, authority, and confinement in the Victorian United States.
I often ask students to read a work of literature unrelated to our historical unit and use it to draw analogies to the themes we are studying. I use literature this way because it makes abstract concepts more accessible. Stories give students an entry point into complex historical ideas by bringing large historical forces down to a human scale.
When I first started using literature as a thought laboratory for history––rather than keeping the two disciplines in separate lanes––I had hoped students would make connections between the story and our historical content. What has surprised me is how far they have taken the ideas, often beyond where I had taken it myself.
Seeing Power Through Story
A work of literature may have nothing directly to do with a historical topic but can still help students understand the human dynamics that shape history. Questions of power, fear, hierarchy, resistance, and unintended consequences appear across time and place. When students notice those dynamics in a story, they are often better prepared to carry that understanding into the historical material.
For this particular assignment, students recognized that the narrator’s problem was not simply a lack of freedom, but that she lacked the authority to define her own reality. The physician does not merely control her actions; he controls what counts as truth. When she disagrees, her dissent becomes evidence of illness. Students quickly saw the larger pattern: Power often sustains itself not only through force or restriction, but through claims to superior knowledge. That is an important historical insight, and one we do not regularly teach in the K–12 social studies classroom.
Using literature as a thought laboratory is not just a creative lesson idea. It reflects how students often already make sense of the world. Students who might struggle to grasp imperialism as an abstract political process can recognize control presented as kindness, authority justified through expertise, or frustration growing under restriction when those ideas appear in fiction. When we strip away obvious references to the content students learned in class, it forces students to look at things more deeply and practice analogical thinking.
Why This Works in Independent Schools
Independent schools typically value more than content coverage—we want classrooms where students discuss ideas, test creative interpretations, and learn to think with depth. Using literature to open historical inquiry fits naturally within that model. It asks students to do more than memorize facts. They interpret, compare, defend claims, and listen carefully to one another.
In the history classroom, it also pushes against the model students often find least satisfying: memorize these dates, learn these names, repeat them on a test. It gives students a stronger sense of voice as well. In a discussion built around a text, students can enter through observation and reasoning rather than waiting for the one correct answer. This work often leads to richer participation and more genuine intellectual risk-taking. Students who are quiet in more conventional settings sometimes become central voices in these conversations.
Just as importantly, this is part of what the humanities are for. History and literature together help students practice judgment. They learn how people justify power, how authority can be abused, and how human beings respond under pressure. Those habits of mind matter in college, in leadership, and in civic life. Independent schools often talk about educating the whole student; this is one way to do it in practice.
Students Can Do More Than We Think
Some teachers might wonder how this concept might translate to their classrooms, especially if they observe that their students are struggling with abstraction or are still trying to master the basic facts of the lesson. What I have found, though, is that students are often more capable of this kind of thinking than adults assume.
The issue is often not an inability to think deeply. It is that school sometimes asks students to begin with ideas that feel distant and lifeless. A story gives them something they can see. They can react to a character, a conflict, or an imbalance of power. And while a student may struggle with notes, vocabulary, or formal writing, they can still be excellent at reading people and situations. Many can quickly recognize patterns of influence, unfairness, and manipulation—insights they practice in everyday interactions.
When students experience history taught this way, I often see meaningful changes. They begin to notice the humanity of historical actors. They see history as something that is actively occurring through the actions of flesh-and-blood people instead of static list of inevitabilities. Beyond that, their claims in discussion and writing become stronger and more original. Students who once offered only rote factual responses begin taking intellectual risks.
Most encouraging of all, they start to see history not as a list of things to remember, but as something to interpret and understand.