Reddit mentions of Johnny Tremain

I'm a big fan of historical fiction. In my mind it serves the same focus as movies based on history--it's an introduction to a time period and may spur someone to learn more about that time period. Even historical fiction that's mostly wrong can do this.

As a kid Johnny Tremain helped to get me started on the American Revolution.

A little later Red Badge of Courage got me intensely interested in the Civil War.

To Kill A Mockingbird is both a novel of the Depression and of the historical Deep South. Not normally regarded as historical fiction, but in a way it is. Steinbeck is probably best known for The Grapes of Wrath (another bit of historical fiction about the Depression), but I think that his book In Dubious Battle tells a more interesting story of how Communism was an important part of labor movements during this time period.

Harry Mazer's The Last Bomber does a pretty good job of telling what it was like for bomber crews and is told from the perspective of a 15 year old boy who runs away to join the Air Force.

Likewise Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is regarded as a "classic" but most people seem to forget that it's historical fiction about the Spanish Civil War.

I'm sure that Aubrey Martin will get brought up. Love the series, but I actually got into those long after my interest in the Age of Sail. I read Bernard Cornwall's Azincourt recently and found it a fantastic bit of historical fiction that does a pretty good job laying out the basics of Henry V's campaign. I can't speak to the accuracy of his other historical fiction because I haven't read it, but I know that his [Richard Sharpe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_(novel_series) series (featuring a British soldier during the Napoleonic Wars) is incredibly popular and was turned into a tv series featuring Sean Bean as Sharpe.

Eric Flint's 1632 is a bit of counter-factual fun (what if a mining town from West Virginia was dropped into the middle of the Thirty Years' War), but it helped me get interested in that time period. Of course the later books in the series don't work so well for history since it diverges so much from real events, but I find that a good counter-factual history requires a thorough understanding of the time period you're diverging from. Plus there's a great section in there on Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, a fascinating character in his own right.

There's more, but yeah I absolutely think historical fiction is an important part of teaching about history. History is more than facts and figures, it's the story of our past. What better way to tell that story than actually writing a story?