The House Divided weekend meant too much for me to publish in just one blog post, so I’d like to highlight what I think is one of the most important things I took away from the events. The House Divided Project and this weekend’s events made me take a deep look at why we actually study history and who it impacts.
Working on my documentary, I had definitely been fairly caught up in the workload and technical details of the film. But as I sat there in the theater with hundreds of people watching, it really started to hit me how much the documentary was impacting the audience and the town. The slow walk of the AME choir only highlighted who should be benefiting from our historical work. It’s the town, the people, the teachers and the students. And I believe this idea of extending history beyond the scholarly gates is exactly what the House Divided Project embodies.
This motif really came to light during the teacher workshops. I think the teachers had no doubt that they were asked to come to the workshop not just to show off a product, but really to hear out criticism and figure out how House Divided can best help out them. How can a teacher inspire a student to map out the path of a famous historical figure? How can they eliminate the struggles and frustration of online search for children and allow them to more easily tackle historical research?
It’s questions like these that I think the weekend events really tackled. The documentaries showed an audience how history can be entertaining and moving. The teacher workshops connected historians to teachers to students and started to chip at the wall between scholars and the classroom. And the tours aimed at drawing out the community and making historical representation interesting for the computer savvy world.
Talking with my step-mom tonight, I told her, “The thing about academia is that no one will ever care as much about your topic as you do.” You have to know your audience and know what they want, need and care about. And I believe the House Divided events made it very clearly that historians can do the research, now it’s time to engage the rest of us.