History for the Youth

My friend Duckling, over at Blackberry Picking has a fantastic idea about creating a history related blog targeting young adolescents, say 10 to 15 years old. I think this will make for a very unique and valuable project. She is nearing the close of her own graduate studies in history. In the fall I begin a half decade or more journey of a doctorate in history. I hope eventually I’ll be able to call myself a historian, and with even greater pride, a teacher. I must confess though that, at the end of the line, I have rather quaint images of myself as a writer of children’s stories, holed up in a Norwegian mountain cottage which is somehow miraculously connected to the internet.

I don’t know what Duckling’s motivations are, but I tend to agree with a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.” (p90 in my copy). Whenever I interact with children, I can almost feel the years of meaningless crap being scraped from an aging heart. It is the storyteller that inspires children. The only difference between them and us, as far as I’m concerned, is that we see this in them, but refuse to see it in ourselves. Whatever one’s stance on the relationship of history to literature, I think we can all agree that history is born of the storyteller’s craft. In my case, I fed a hunger for fantasy with reading and child’s play. The interactive element provided by a love for role-playing games was incredibly important as well. I think Duckling’s idea is an exciting one and I wish her luck in it and her other projects.