“History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.” ~Hajo Holborn

Living in Edinburgh, every step I take is drenched in history. There are few places I have or will travel this year that has not harbored thousands of years of memories. Even returning to Biloxi in August, I will find my own personal and familial past waiting for me under clear starry summer nights. Really, is history ever not surrounding us? Are we just ignorant to its presence, until attention is demanded? I think this is very true.


**WIll We Remember her in a hundred years?**

Many occasions I am stupefied by the knowledge of what occurred in certain places. Even places I have never stepped foot upon. Sunday I viewed at the Edinburgh Film House (an old style theatre specializing in independent films) a documentary on the Holocaust called KZ. This piece of cinema followed tour groups through a concentration camp, which is located in Austria. The crew also interviewed residence, some even in the town when the camp was in use during World War II. On one particular scene the groups are taken into this tiny gas chamber. I do not have to expand on what happened in that tiny cement room. Just viewing it in a theatre made my pulse rate and my stomach turn. I fear if I had been in that tour group inside the actual sight I would have been subject to a panic attack. It would feel like the violence is still there trying to grab me from some nearly forgotten era.


**William Wallace monument- Stirling, Scotland**

Sights with history much later in time can be just as powerful. When I toured Edinburgh Castle on St. Andrews Day we entered the underground rooms where Prisoners of War resided. These chambers were home to many POWs from many different wars including the American Revolution. The doors contained graffiti from all of them including icons of the old Colonial flag. It’s like all those ideals, hopes, fears, and experiences swirled around me. I could imagine the sacrifice made for our country and many other principles. Over two hundred years later, they still whispered to me.


**Touching History at Edinburgh Castle**

Okay, okay, I’m getting a wee bit romantic. Anyway, so many things should not be forgotten by history. That’s why I find it so important to study, read, and teach it. Everything is important to me in the scope of things. Even the stories of young girls sent to work on the farm in the Women’s Land Army during World War II. I giggled at the National Library this weekend when I read the account of a Land Girl who had to relieve herself behind the tree and was spotted by a farm hand who then claimed she had a “Nice little piece of rump.” All of it is important and all of it needs to be remembered in some way, shape, or form.
Besides if we don’t remember them… who is going to remember us?



“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.” ~Winston Churchill