{"id":7136,"date":"2017-07-10T00:37:50","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T05:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7136"},"modified":"2017-06-24T10:45:24","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:45:24","slug":"history-is-for-all-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=7136","title":{"rendered":"HISTORY IS FOR ALL OF US"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>Wonderful interview with Dr. Margaret Bendroth, Executive Director of the Congregational Library &amp; Archives.\u00a0 HT: www.thewayofimprovement.com<\/h4>\n<h4><strong>JUNTO: When we spoke, you stressed the importance of storytelling as a means of getting a variety of people interested in history. How does storytelling factor into the work that you do? How does it connect to your research and writing?<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p><strong>BENDROTH: I invite a lot of academics to give talks at the Library\u2014we have a monthly \u201cHistory Matters\u201d series that brings in a mix of people in our downtown area. I get twitchy when a presenter starts talking about \u201cnegotiating\u201d and \u201ccomplicating\u201d and \u201cconstructing.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s not that these words are bad\u2014they\u2019re great at academic conferences and I love most of them dearly. But (and I\u2019m overstating a bit) the people in our audience profoundly do not care. It\u2019s not that they can\u2019t understand the concepts\u2014I\u2019m sure most of them could\u2014but that\u2019s not why there are there. I think that, like most human beings, they are looking for connection. They want to hear about other human beings, other lives, stories that make someone from the past both totally foreign and utterly familiar.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>We should never forget that. I\u2019m not saying that every historian has to be David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin\u2014would that we could sell that many books! But if we can\u2019t explain our ideas in clear simple language that the average person, then we don\u2019t really understand them ourselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The rest is here: <a href=\"https:\/\/earlyamericanists.com\/category\/special-features\/where-historians-work\/\">https:\/\/earlyamericanists.com\/category\/special-features\/where-historians-work\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wonderful interview with Dr. Margaret Bendroth, Executive Director of the Congregational Library &amp; Archives.\u00a0 HT: www.thewayofimprovement.com JUNTO: When we spoke, you stressed the importance of storytelling as a means of getting a variety of people interested in history. How does storytelling factor into the work that you do? How does it connect to your research [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,37,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-learningeducation","category-teaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7136"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7140,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136\/revisions\/7140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}