LIVING HISTORIAN’S CREED

We are the people to whom the past is forever speaking.
We listen to it because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices.
Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone went through fire and storm to break a path to the future.
We are part of that future they died for.
They are part of the past that brought the future.
What they did–the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died–make up a part of our own experience.
It is as real as something that happened last week.
It is a basic part of our heritage as Americans.
by: Bruce Catton

History is lived forward, but it is written in retrospect, we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.
by: British Historian, Dame C. V. Wedgwood.

“We are all Americans”. Ulysses S. Grant

The photo was taken on the porch of the McLean house at Appomattox Court House National Historical Site.
It features Scott Thomas as General Seth Thomas. Scott is clutching the sword I gave him in a ceremony in camp upon his ‘retirement’ from Lincoln’s Generals. He carried it with him for the entire event. Scott embodied the highest, purest ideals of a Living Historian. He is gone now. I mourn him and miss him. General U. S. Grant