Is it important or imperative to know and understand the history of the place where you're from?
While reading our third reading assignment from Heat-Moon about Miz Alice who lives on an island, I got to thinking about history. Miz Alice, an old woman Heat-Moon runs into, lives isolated on an island and has her own opinions about others on the island. She knows the history of her home inside and out. Personally, I don't think it's imperative to know the history of where you're from, and I'm talking about your hometown here, not your country which I think is imperative. While not imperative to know about your hometown, I do think it's importantto know just to better understand yourself and your family. After reading, I thought about how much I know about Dallas, which besides knowing SMU was founded here in 1911, and that it's pretty much the best city ever :), was not too much else. The reading made me want to find out more about Dallas and it's history. My mom told me the other day that Preston Road runs all the way to Kansas City because it was used by cattle herders to drive cattle up there to buy and sell. I thought that was pretty cool, and that it'd be interesting to know all about Dallas history.
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Good question. The year that I had my 1301 students buy Blue Highways and read more in it than I'm having you do, we actually wrote local history papers. Everybody could write about some aspect of the place where they were from. (One girl wrote about the intersection of Park and Preston, and what used to be there.) SMU is the perfect place to do research on local history because of our DeGoyler Library, the separate part of the library you enter through the West end of Fondren. The DeGoyler Collection holds books, maps, manuscripts--and model trains--all kinds of stuff about local history of the US, mainly but not exclusively from the East Coast through the Louisiana Purchase. I think undergraduate students need an instructor's assignment to enter the library, but many history assignments would allow you to use this library. Your original question: Does it matter? Yes, I think it does. You appreciate what those who came before did to lay the groundwork for what we have today. We owe it to them not to forget. As Miz Alice would say, their deeds matter.
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