Dennis Lehane's Use Of Historical Accuracy

History is the study of the past significant events that have crafted our modern world since the days humans began recording their own history. A subject that many find dull or uninteresting. History seems to be forgotten often with the excuse that it has already happened therefore carrying no importance to the readers in contemporary time. This however is quite the contradiction. People are always surrounded by history and people are forever making history whether it is important to the world or just a personal history. We study history to learn from the world previous mistakes. History on the other hand also is not a subject to learn so that humanity does not make the same mistakes. That is the beauty of “The Given Day” by Dennis Lehane.

First thing when looking for the accuracies or inaccuracies with the book is to gather information about the Author or Authors. When looking at any work the reader must check into the legitimacy of the writer or writers. This is can possibly foreshadow not just how well the book is written but how accurate it is. It can help decipher if the route of the book is more fantasy than history if the reader so chooses to use the novel as a way to possibly imagine life in the early twentieth century as many of us have no first hand experience with life in the twentieth century. This novel takes place in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States of America right after the demise of the Central powers as an aftermath of World War I. Dennis Lehane was not even born until nineteen sixty five. Readers can already see that even though fictionalized little personal life can reflect through this novel as it was about an era over four decades older than when he was born. This may effect legitimacy in many peoples eyes compared to as if a man who lived in the late nineteen tens wrote a fictionalization of the turn of the century America because he or he would have the personal connection to the era It may also be off putting that there is little to no formal historical introduction or

This sounds extremely similar to modern issue Americans have today. Often do people see on almost every media outlet the outcry for higher wages. Their is wild debates on health care and education reform. But before these topics were rarely talked about it was seemingly taboo. This was the talk of socialist. Socialism in short is a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Wages were historically an issue for working foces since the beginning of paying wages. The issue of whether or not a wage could supporrt basic necessities is quite contreversial in the early nineteen hundred . Take one of America’s biggest industries, The Textile industry. In the early nineteen hundred 65.8 percent of all strikes were based off of wages.2 Even if you look at all strikes for all industries during the early nineteen hundreds 56.1 percent of strikes were about wages3 that is over half of all strikes being over wages. To add to these astounding numbers corporations and factories beat the workers at staggering rates. Workers lost nearly 66 percent of the time during any strike4. What shocks many early americans is the take on industries and corporations have on