To Tell a Different Story: Narrative, Nation, History

Abstract This essay reads The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky, and Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants, by Joanna Brooks as contributing to the study of nation, narrative, and identity central to American studies in the early twenty-first century. Both books center excluded narrators and the forms and genres in which they recorded their lives: folk ballads and the poor white Europeans who migrated to North America in Why We Left, and a diversity of narrators working in documentary and autobiographical forms from pre-colonial histories through the turn of the early 2000s in The Divided States.