I'm History...but Do I Repeat Myself?

New Social Studies at my Old High School

"How quaint…or is this kind of lame?" thought artist Lee Knapp after she half-heartedly returned to teach history at her old public high school. Because her private history was in a state of upheaval, it seemed she had no choice. It turned out to be life-changing.

On her once nearly all-white campus outside of Richmond, Virginia, Knapp found a new, wildly diverse population of students walking its old sidewalks. They would expand and even explode the foundations of an identity that she had been constructing since graduating in America's bicentennial: her evangelicalism, her Southern heritage, her community. Knapp engagingly weaves in moments from big history that, as Twain reminds us, may not repeat, but certainly rhyme with our current moment.

Knapp's personal history was also reconstructed on her old campus after the end of a long marriage by a completely unforeseen second-chance romance with a widowed colleague.