Living History

From AMI History album: 

          There is a story that comes from Leicester in England, the name of which is derived from the Latin castra, meaning “camp”.  There is a museum in this area with lots of things that have been dug up from the Roman times onward.  There was a little account in the newspaper told by the curator of the museum:


       Every day before he goes to work, he goes down to the basement and picks up a brick and holds it.  That brick takes him back to the time of the Romans being in the city of Leicester because in the brick is the little print of a child’s foot and lines that must have been drawn with a stick, a child of about two years old.  He was probably amongst workmen making bricks and came upon the brick before it was dried.  He probably took a stick, as tiny children do, and began to draw lines on it.  Some adult must have come along and shooed him off, and he went running, leaving his foot imprint on the brick.

         It is stories like this that make history come alive; this little boy playing at the time of the Romans.  Now that brick is there in the museum, a display-piece of the lives and times of these people.  

History needs to be made visible.  

It is not a record to be memorized.  

It is a life to be lived and to be studied.