About
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Like other students, my high school history classes were tortuously dull - requiring endlessly memorization of dates and battles without any interesting context. When I entered college (as a French Language major), I was exposed to a whole new approach to the past within just a few engaging lectures by enthusiastic professors. What I quickly discovered was the simple truth that history is a compilation of stories. From that point on, all other classes -- math, film studies, literature, science, etc. -- added color to the historical adventures that I absorbed voraciously.
In an effort to get as close to experiencing life as the historical figures I admired as I could, I spent a semester studying in Paris exactly 100 years after the storming of the Bastille. Daily, proud French historians offered new excursions, exhibits, movies, reenactments and lectures on the French Revolution.
Nearly thirty years later, I was still telling students about the ever active bloody guillotine, the bold attack on religion, the radical decision to change time and calendars, gory patriotic art, heroic assassinations and the less heroic genocide of nobles. i hoped to instill in these teeens the love of history that has been the perpetual source of my entertainment.
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Amanda Roraback
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- Amanda Roraback