She wrote it on our collaborative blog Observations from the Knee-Deep South HERE. An excerpt is below. I really like what she wrote about history and the past. Please comment if you feel inspired. Thanks!
I don't know if anyone else has read the novel The Help which has recently been made into a movie. It's written by a White southern woman but told largely from the point of view of two Black maids. It's set in Jackson, Mississippi in the sixties right in the middle of the civil rights struggle.
When I teach the fourth graders at our school about the first Thanksgiving I start by introducing the Social Studies theme for the year. I tell them that we are going to be history detectives and work on various cases. To start, I define the difference between history and the past. The past, I tell them, is what actually happened, and history is how we talk about what happens. The past is always the same, but history changes across tellers and time.
