The HRC thanks Anne Farrow for serving as guest author for the following entry. Anne is the senior content editor for the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online, a project of the Connecticut Humanities Council. Formerly a career journalist, Anne co-authored Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery. She is currently at work on a new book about slavery and memory.

What do we talk about when we talk about history?

When university professors Roy Rosenzweig, David Thelen and a few like-minded professionals began to address that question in the late 1980s, they didn't mean the history elite like themselves, but ordinary people who were not trained as historians, did not teach history for a living and did not derive a paycheck from any aspect of retailing or retelling American history.

And perhaps because Rosenzweig and his fellow professors were open-minded enough to know - and to accept - that their own highly traditional roles as university purveyors of the history canon might not be the whole story, they built, conducted and documented a national survey that revealed a profound and personal connection between Americans and their past. In writing The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, they found that Americans use their daily life and personal histories as ways to connect to the past, and that in the stories of ancestors and objects and old houses they find new ways to think about themselves.

Deciding on the questions to ask, the language in which to pose them, whom to survey and the mechanics of the survey itself took several years (their methodology is fully described in an appendix to the book), but the thought and consideration that went into every aspect of this endeavor made the results all the more significant. By the time the data had been gathered in 1994, data drawn from approximately 1,000 hours of conversation with 1,500 Americans nationwide, Rosenzweig and Thelen were ready to begin their analysis of what it meant, and they were scared.

"Nothing in our professional training had prepared us to interpret what we were hearing...we were getting transcripts of rich conversations, but how would we find general patterns to make sense of these individual encounters?" they wrote.

Interviewees had lots to say about the past, but history as defined by textbooks was conspicuously absent. "This absence of conventional historical narratives and frameworks surprised us," they write. The collective voice of "our roots," "our culture," and "our people" emerged from interviews with African Americans and Native Americans, but much less often from those with white interviewees, which suggests that those who are most connected to the idea of an overarching American narrative are those who have been most betrayed.

Connection to the past comes in many forms. Many respondents who commented that they had not enjoyed studying history in school nevertheless enjoyed collecting and learning about objects that reminded them of the story of their family; they researched family genealogies and kept journals of daily life so that their children would know "what had happened"; they went to historical sites and read books related to the history that interested them.

And in the same way that professional historians usually go more deeply into their subject over time, and thus increase their knowledge, the respondents began exploring what they most often called "the past," and it led them deeper into new interests.

An African-American woman from Oklahoma had taken a class on African dance to understand "something that was done by my ancestors," and it led her to read books by Africans, to visit Dr. Martin Luther King's birthplace to plan a trip to Africa.

A homemaker from Tennessee who found high-school history classes irrelevant found Civil War reenactments full of meaning, and told the interviewer she thought the NAACP was trying to "take away" her history.

In chapter after chapter, the authors share the direct personal commentary of the respondents, and it makes for fascinating reading. The comments are carefully contextualized and unvarnished. The reader hears equally from the 87-year-old Indiana woman whose grandfather was a prisoner at Andersonville - she said his story was her "inheritance" - as from the 34-year-old Revolutionary War reenactor, who described his reenacting as "a form of living history, rather than just reading a book, which is rather static. "

In seeking to understand how Americans who are not historians make use of and understand the past, this book opens the door to a conversation which is and will continue to be ongoing: What does a participatory historical culture look like? Whose ideas count, and in what infinite number of forms can those ideas be lived?

Dr. Rosenzweig, a professor of history at George Mason University, died of cancer in 2007, and Dr. Thelen, now public historian in residence at American University, began their inquiry because they wanted to break down barriers between professional historians and the wider citizenry. They were unafraid of what they might learn and eager to embrace the changes it would bring and they created a book that is no less alive and important than when it was published 12 years ago.

It may seem hyperbolic to suggest, but The Presence of the Past has the luminosity that comes from real questions asked and real answers heard. Rosenzweig and Thelen didn't expect the answers they got, but they put aside what they thought they knew, and they let something new step forward. Americans care deeply about their history, and they want a stake in defining what is important.

Among the many fascinating findings that emerged from the survey are:

• Respondents regarded "personal" sources of information, such as grandparents and relatives, as significantly more likely to be accurate than television programs or movies, and history museums are regarded as even more trustworthy than grandparents;

• Asked to name an important American martyr, African American respondents named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; white respondents named John F. Kennedy;

• Participation in historical events is not, for the most part, tied to particular social groups or backgrounds;

• When respondents commented on national historical events, it was almost never in a general way; the connection was always personal, through the life of a family member or a friend.

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