"I remember exactly when I wanted to work in a museum, and that was when
I was 12," says historian C. Morgan Grefe. Grefe went to museums all the
time as a kid. When she was 12, she went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Although she had been to the museum many times with her family, it was the
first time she ever took an official tour with the education department of
the museum.
"I had a choice between the Fairy Tale Tour or the Arms and Armor Tour,
and I chose Arms and Armor," says Grefe.
"This was my first experience having an actual person showing me things.
A woman wheeled out a cart with armor and chain mail in it. She asked who
wanted to try it on, and she picked me because I was the first girl who had
ever volunteered. I wanted everyone to be able to experience things like that."
Grefe now has a PhD in history. She is a director with the Rhode Island
Historical Society. She develops educational programs. Her specialty is American
history, with a focus on prison history, African-American history and literature,
and 18th/19th-century domestic life and interiors.
Most historians work as professors at universities. But Grefe always knew
that she'd prefer to work in museums.
"I knew I wanted to apply the intellectual rigor outside of the classroom,"
says Grefe. "I always felt that museums and historical societies are where
you can have that kind of contact with public. That's what drew me to it --
I get to work with five-year-olds and 65-year-olds, while still sustaining
my relationships with universities and various institutions."
Elizabeth Dale is a professor of legal history who worked as a lawyer before
returning to school to become a historian. As a child, she was "vaguely interested"
in history, she says.
"My parents took me to museums and things like that, so I had a good basic
knowledge of history," says Dale.
In university, she majored in ancient Greece. Then she earned her law degree
and worked for a while at a law firm.
"My firm practiced constitutional law, and a lot of that has a historical
background," says Dale. "I got interested in [legal history] because of that.
People who aren't lawyers think they can't ever understand law, and I thought
teaching the history of law would make it accessible for people who weren't
going to be lawyers [since] law is so important."
Andrew Gow is a professor of medieval history. He remembers reading the
Canterbury Tales in Middle English with his father when he was eight or nine
years old. His father was a social worker, but also a scholar of such things
as Middle English, Old English and Norse literature.
"I guess learning a medieval language as a child sparked my interest in
the more distant past," says Gow. "Because obviously it wasn't the English
I was used to, and it was a puzzle and a fascination. So throughout my adolescent
years I checked out most of the Middle English contents of the Ottawa public
library."
Gow would also read 19th- and 20th-century novels from his
mother's personal library. This further sparked his interest in the past.
"At the same time I was living in a neighborhood composed almost exclusively
of Holocaust survivors," says Gow. "Most of the parents of the kids had numbers
tattooed on their arms, and that was proof that history isn't over. It's right
here with us all the time."