If you read academic blogs, you will see considerable debate about how 
best to present history at the college level and in scholarly books.  
Obviously there are various approaches, ranging from triumphalist to 
deconstructionist.  To me, both the leader-oriented and the 
ordinary-people oriented approaches are valid.  The trick is to be 
objective and not to appear to be applying a political agenda or an 
overly ideological approach to looking at the past.  Judging by some of 
the name calling I see on some history oriented blogs and message 
boards, this is easier said than done!

I don't envy people teaching at the K - 12 levels, I have to say!  I'm 
glad I went to school when they didn't teach to the test, LOL.

In my youth, during the late 1960s and 1970s, I was a member of the 
Richard III Society.  (See http://www.r3.org/ and
http://www.richardiii.net/ ).  One of my favorite books was Paul Murray 
Kendall's _The Yorkist age; daily life during the Wars of the Roses_, 
published in 1962.  Boy, did it give you a good sense of time and 
place!  It covered both the kings and nobility as well as the masses.

I visited the York city archives in Great Britain in 1977 and was 
pictured along with my sister, looking at some of the 15th century 
manuscripts in a local newspaper.   I recently had joined the staff of 
the National Archives' fledgling Nixon Project.  Of course, the York 
newspaper reporter used the headline, "From Richard Crouchback to 
Tricky Dicky" in writing about my career and interests.  LOL.

Maarja

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