How does fiction help people understand history?

Historical fiction takes real events and adds things that logically might have happened. This not only makes for more interesting reading, but it gives you insights into things that probably did occur. For example, you might write about the effects of a famous battle on the family of one of the soldiers, as they waited to hear news of the fighting, and worried about whether the soldier would survive. Your soldier and his family might be fictional, but you know that real families and real soldiers went through just what's in that story.