Hit the Dirt, Make History

I have a meeting tomorrow with a historian extraordinaire and one of the best people you will ever meet. She is allowing me some of her valuable time to explain this project and ask for the endorsement of the organization she chairs at a large western university.

If the organization endorses this project, or if it decides that may not be compatible with everything else on their table doesn't matter as much as being able to talk about it with someone as knowledgeable in her field. She has such a deep and abiding love and knowledge of western American history I can't help but come away enriched. She is the lightning rod for and one of, if not the, founder of a vital new approach to the history of the West. But she is much more. She is a teller of wonderful stories, a crafter of the written and spoken word.

Those of you who elect to traverse the borders and tell those stories here are contributing to a new cut of history. One way to think about the narratives you construct from your experience is comparing them to journals kept by early pioneers and colonizers. Stories, narratives, video and photography that you post here contribute a unique and needed perspective on history. A history being made and shaped in large degree today by this method of participating in recording it.