In this episode of History Through Fiction: The Podcast, host Colin Mustful welcomes award‑winning novelist Katherine Scott Crawford, author of The Miniaturist Assistant. Set between 2004 and 1804 Charleston, South Carolina, Katherine’s novel follows Gamble Vance, a recently divorced art conservator who restores tiny miniature portraits in a historic museum—and who begins to suspect that one of those portraits, and a girl she sees in a shadowed alley, may be calling to her from the past.

Colin and Katherine talk about the meticulous art of miniature portrait restoration—those inch‑tall, ivory ovals that once served as 18th‑ and 19th‑century “selfies”—and how that work inspired Gamble’s world at the Gilliard Museum of Art. They step back into 1804 Charleston through the eyes of Daniel Pettigrew, a portraitist loosely based  ...