11/15/23 Analyst Rather than Historian

Breann Hendrickson, host of our CommStock Digital Network called me “CommStock’s Historian” when interviewing me recently. I suppose that seems true but I am not a historian. When young and determining what career path I wished to take, I considered becoming a historian, an academic professor. I found that I did not like school all that much and preferred being self-employed. I enjoyed the Theodore Roosevelt Symposium last month in ND and heard several historians share their work on different topics ranging from the labor movement development in the US and sex worker trade in New York during Tammany Hall. They focused on their narrow subject matter rather than on TR, only connected the two as dots. I had the opportunity to have a fireside chat with the director of the TR Digital library at DSU who was also a historian. I shared my disappointment in that speakers did not discuss more on the relevance of their historical work to TR or to conditions today. He explained that historians do not do that. He says that his job as a historian was to dig up every piece of relevant information on his subject matter but that the relevance to today…