How to make history more appealing

Sam Smith - Chatting with friends about how to improve our local history center brought the realization that I view the matter a bit differently thanks to having been an anthropology major in college. When we studied societies around the world, past and present blended. I remember for example, studying the decline in the artistry of a native American tribe's pottery over time and how this helped describe its culture. 

But in America we draw a distinct line between the past and what's happening now even if the latter is highly dependent on the former. And besides, everything that happened more than ten seconds ago is history. Past and present are very close.

A problem with all this is that things that are recently past don't get the respect of being "history." For example, one reason the critical race theory movement seems strange to me is that I was part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and don't recall much talk of slavery and other evils from the distant past because we were too busy dealing with present issues.  Today one hears little about teaching students how to improve ethnic relations. There is no PET - positive ethnic theory - that actually could be a more effective approach to the issue. It wouldn't deny CRT but create a better balance between past, recent and present. After all, we can't change the past but we certainly can change the future.

On the other hand, our political discussions are almost exclusively immersed in what is happening today/ The useful knowledge of how it differs from the past is largely ignored. For example, we treat the chronic deceptions of our leaders as the norm and something like the attempted Jan 6 coup is never referred to as treason because we don't talk like that today. 

On a less controversial level, in my small Maine town, a history center could blend past stories about lobstering with current lobstermen explaining what it's like today. Instead of reducing history to something you leave after high school, blending history and current culture not only is more appealing, it is a more accurate way of sharing the story you're trying to tell.

I'm a journalist married to a historian and I can assure you it also makes life more interesting.