A small glimpse into 2025—happy (belated) New Year!

A small glimpse into 2025—it was a busy, yet rewarding year. Highlights included my students participating in National History Day for a second year and receiving awards from the Mississippi Humanities Council and my alma mater. I also decided on a term for my work, community historian. It seems more fitting than public historian or civil rights historian. Being in community greatly informs my scholarship and through these connections, I’ve become a stronger writer, researcher, and teacher. For that, I am truly thankful.

Perhaps, these first “new year” posts include 2026 goals, but mine are simple—post more, write more, and read a lot more, so I am excited to share new research findings, glimpses of the archive, and other musings.

This post is a short one, but I want to close with a portion of my November speech. If I could give it a title, I’d call it ‘Choices.’

A graduate professor once asked us in class to think about this question as we read—“Who does their work free?” That question, three years later, still haunts me to my core—who does my work free? And oftentimes in the humanities, I used to think of my impact as small. But as we wake up in a world that grows even more evil by day, hour…second…with leaders who see the history I teach as a threat, I realize how big my role is in working with communities to preserve historical records, teach justice-impacted youth about the past, and write about those grassroots folks who truly shaped Mississippi’s history. And there is so much work to do, and I am just me. So now, I make another choice, to toss that very question that the professor asked us one day, so now it can haunt you too—who does your work free?

Peace,
Christina