Connect

I've been thinking about my writing. I've been thinking about history - not that is anything new.

But I've been thinking about people. Not half-crazed history nerds sitting on a stone wall in an old cemetery drinking a milkshake and reading a book about the guy buried in the plot next to him. I mean normal people. The kind of folks that get up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat supper, watch some TV, take a shower and go to bed. I realize that much of my activities are odd to normal folks. But I think that something about what I do resonates with people. 

Stick with me on this one.

I have spent my life immersed in history. Books, papers, tests, essays, microfiche, websites, professors, battlefields, museums, cemeteries. I've done it all. It's actually fun for me. But the normal person is not wired that way. Joe the rag man doesn't want to write, or read, a ten page annotated thesis on the similarities of Alex Stephens' "Cornerstone Speech" and the remarks of Abraham Lincoln during the fourth debate with Stephen Douglas at Charleston, IL in September, 1858. 

But those similarities are important. So is the rest of history. People need to know.

I'll make the statement, "people want to know". But they're afraid to attend a lecture. They hate writing papers and sure don't want to take any tests.

But here's what writing this blog has taught me. The four biggest entries (measured by page hits) include a tradition of hanging a star between the smokestacks of an old cotton mill, an ice cold glass bottle of coke in an old country store, my wife's entry about family recipes and the untimely death of a true hero..

People want history to matter. They want to see it, touch it, taste it, remember it. We need new ways to help them experience it - ways that they can connect with.

I want to further explore some of the ways people are doing that.  I'm excited to see what the folks at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta are doing - from a Victorian festival to their "Run Like Hell" 5K. But that is just one example.

Long way around saying there's more history, nostalgia and culture to come...