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.

In her entertaining memoir, I'm History…but do I repeat myself?, recently retired public school teacher Lee Knapp recounts the effects that the entirely new population on her old familiar campus had on her life. As a metaphor of America itself, her once nearly all-white alma mater—outside the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, no less—now boasted being one of the most diverse in the state, a state that led the Massive Resistance movement in the fifties to prevent this very thing from ever happening.

With deftness and humor, Knapp explores how her return expanded, if not exploded, the foundations of an identity that she had been constructing since graduating in America’s bicentennial: her evangelicalism, her Southern heritage, her suburban community. Into this reexamination, Knapp engagingly weaves in moments from big history that, as Twain reminds us, may not repeat, but certainly rhyme with our current moment.

Throughout these four sections, Knapp also traces the unexpected trajectory of her personal history. Beginning life as a devout, idealistic newlywed twenty-something, she ended up as a disoriented, backslidden newly divorced fifty-something.

Disoriented, that is, until Knapp’s personal life was also reconstructed on that campus by a totally unforeseen, second-chance romance with a widowed colleague. I'm History ponders the struggle between hope and fear, tradition and change, narrow and open perspectives in our collective, as well as our personal, histories.

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