This time of year can be a grind. If you have forgotten why you teach history, or read it, or write it, I offer two quotes. Do the words ring true for you?
David McCullough wrote:
“History is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive. It’s like poetry and art. Or music. And it’s ours, to enjoy.
If we deny our children that enjoyment, that adventure in the larger time among the greater part of the human experience, we’re cheating them out of a full life.
There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: ‘Tell stories.'”1
(David McCullough, Simon and Schuster)
President Harry Truman said:
“The only thing new in the world is the history we don’t know.”2
Harry S. Truman (New York Times)
Endnotes
1 David McCullough, History Matters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025), p. 5.
2. Harry S. Truman, quoted in Samuel W. Rushay Jr., “Harry Truman’s History Lessons,” Prologue Magazine, Spring 2009, vol. 41, no. 1, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/spring/truman-history.html .
David Connon has spent nearly two decades researching dissenters in Iowa: Grinnell residents who helped on the Underground Railroad, and their polar opposites, Iowa Confederates. He shares some of these stories with audiences across the state through the Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. He worked as an interpreter at Living History Farms for eleven seasons.
Connon is a member of Sons of Union Veterans, an associate member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a member of the Des Moines Civil War Round Table. His articles have appeared in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Iowa History Journal, Illinois Magazine, and local newspapers in both states.
