[NOTE: This article is a lightly edited version of the speech that I gave for the Etowah Valley Historical Society at their History Quiz Bowl event on May 15th, 2022.]

My interest in history dates back just about as far as I can remember. One of my earliest memories relating to history is from 2004, when I was 5 years old and really wanted George W. Bush to lose the presidential election that year. This wasn’t because I was some precocious little activist, but because at the age of 5 I had already memorized the entire list of US Presidents and wanted it to be longer so I would have more to learn as soon as possible. I really did prepare to go on Jeopardy my whole life! 

But of all the history I’ve read over the years, there’s one book that has to be my absolute favorite. It’s called “Here is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History” by Andrew Carroll, and it’s about unmarked sites in American history. Here’s an example, which is actually the story that inspired Andrew Carroll to write the book. There is a train station in Jersey City, New Jersey that Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was traveling through during the Civil War. He was standing near the edge of the train platform waiting for the train to arrive when someone jostled him and he fell off the platform onto the tracks. Before he could get up, the train started coming and was about to run him over when someone reached down and pulled him to safety. Robert looked up to see who had saved him and was surprised to find that he recognized the person – it was one of the most popular celebrities in the country, the actor Edwin Booth. Doesn’t that last name sound familiar? Yes, Edwin Booth, who saved Abraham Lincoln’s son’s life, was the older brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate Abraham Lincoln just a couple years later.

Now, you might expect the spot where this happened to have all kinds of markings – a historical plaque commemorating the event, maybe a little gift shop where they sell Abe Lincoln top hats, something like that – but there’s nothing. Andrew Carroll went to the train station himself to investigate while writing the book, and he found that even though part of the architecture of the station is a big map of the state of New Jersey on the floor with all kinds of historical locations throughout the state marked, there was no reference to the Lincoln-Booth story at all. In fact, while he was looking at the map on the floor, someone waiting for a train asked him what on earth he was staring at the ground for. He pointed out the map on the ground, and she jumped back in surprise – she had been commuting from that station for a long time but had never once stopped to look at the history under her feet.

If such a very obviously marked piece of history could be overlooked like that, an unmarked event like what happened between Robert Lincoln and Edwin Booth is even more likely to be unknown and eventually be forgotten. And remember, this is not just about a couple of nobodies who had a close shave with a train in Jersey City – this was the president’s son and the most famous actor in the country. Imagine what has been forgotten or is at risk of being forgotten about people who are less notable than they were! 

That’s especially true when it comes to local history. We all know where Abraham Lincoln fits into history, even though we’re not from Springfield, Illinois, because his career had effects way beyond his hometown that people around the country and even around the world have documented. But just because someone only had an effect on their hometown doesn’t mean they deserve to be forgotten – it only means that they are more likely to be forgotten, because not as many people know the effect that they had. That’s why the work that the Etowah Valley Historical Society does is so important for this community. If you don’t collect, preserve, cultivate, and pass on what came before you, you will lose what keeps you grounded in the wider world around you. 

This is what I mean by “grounded”: we are living in a time where you can pull out your phone and ask it what the weather will be like in Timbuktu on Tuesday and it will tell you! With tools like that, it is so easy to be swept away by a neverending flood of information. We are seeing the rates of things like depression and anxiety climb higher and higher every year – especially in young people – and I think a big part of that is people feeling like they don’t have a solid foundation in this impossibly big world. Sure, you might live in Cartersville or Adairsville, but you can go on Instagram or Tiktok and immerse yourself in content from all over the world to the point where the places you see around you when you put your phone down just seem kind of gray in comparison.

But that’s a false comparison. As I said before, the world is an impossibly big place, and that means that you don’t have to dig very deep to find more information than you could ever absorb in a lifetime. But Bartow County is a lot smaller. In order to keep yourself connected to and fulfilled by this patch of ground you call home, you have to dig deeper and anchor yourself to it. And of course, what I mean by digging deeper is learning your local history and understanding how it fits into that big wide world around you. This is really a modern issue – the people who lived here hundreds of years ago didn’t encounter much information beyond what they needed to live their daily lives. But now that we are living in the information age and have so much knowledge at the tips of our fingers, we have to make intentional decisions about what information is most important to us. That’s what makes this quiz bowl event so wonderful – it incentivizes our young people to make that decision to prioritize knowing their local history.

Of course, this might not be your local area forever. Our students up on stage could tell you that a lot of influential people started out in Bartow County but went on to leave a mark well beyond it. Sam Jones, the namesake of the church we’re in today, started off his ministry in this area of Northwest Georgia, but his talents gave him the opportunity to preach all over the country. Jessica Daves was a teacher here in Bartow County who took a big risk when she decided she wanted to try and make it in New York City. And make it she did – after years of working her way up through the fashion industry, she eventually became the editor of Vogue magazine. Robert Benham would have already made a mark just by being the first African-American lawyer in Cartersville, but he didn’t stop there. He became a Court of Appeals judge, a Georgia Supreme Court justice, and eventually the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court.

But no matter what you go on to do – whether you move across the country next week, stay here your whole life, or leave for a while and then come back – this place has shaped you. We, as people, are very much the products of the places we spend our time. So the history of where you’ve been is ultimately the history of what made you who you are. But even though that sounds really exciting and interesting at first glance, I think that actually makes a lot of people hesitant to dive too deep into history because they’re afraid of what they’ll find. The past is not a wonderland by any means, and it’s definitely tempting to put up a barrier between ourselves and things like the removal of Native Americans, and slavery, and segregration – after all, we weren’t personally responsible for these things, so why should we worry about them? 

Well, it’s also more comfortable to put up a barrier between ourselves and our personal faults and flaws, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. I know I can never be a perfect person, but I always want to be a better person, and I can only do that if I pull my problems out from under the rug and address them. The same thing applies to history, just on a broader scale. As the great Southern author William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We have to acknowledge that the past is still alive in us because it made us who we are. Once we understand that, we can start to grapple with it, not as individuals but as citizens. Citizenship is a great virtue, but it’s not practiced in a vacuum – it requires us to acknowledge our responsibilities to those around us and put in the effort to fulfill them. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is! When I think about what patriotism means to me, it means loving my country, and love is a verb, not an emotion. Loving a person isn’t just the warm fuzzy feeling you get every time they walk into the room – it means that you care enough about them to put in the work every single day to make their life better. In the same way, loving your country doesn’t mean you hang a flag up on your front porch and call it a day. You have to acknowledge that with every right that you cherish as an American comes a corresponding responsibility to safeguard it for everyone else, especially those who might have been denied those rights in the past. In other words, you can’t just talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk as well, and you can’t know what walk you need to be walking without knowing the historical context that put your community where it is.

So don’t be afraid to put in that work to learn your local history. You’ll be inspired by the effort that the people who came before you put in to build a world they would never get to experience themselves. You’ll be surprised at the connections you find between people and places you never thought were related. And yes, you’ll be disappointed by the actions of people who had a very different set of morals than we have today. But most of all, you’ll be better – better able to understand how you fit into this rapidly changing world, and better able to apply that understanding to make the world a better place. And whether the part of the world you get the chance to change is as big as the planet or as small as your neighborhood, you’ll have the solid historical foundation you need to make it happen.