In October, I had the chance to speak with two classes at Novi High School in Novi, MI. The students were as bright, engaging, and as interested as you could possibly want—a high school version of a college seminar. I had a similar experience a couple of weeks later with middle school students at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA. Both schools asked me to talk about my research process as their students were engaged (for the first time for the younger students) in their own research projects. This was a bit of a challenge since I begin by reading everything I can about a subject, something students embarking on a two-week project can’t possibly do. Still, I found some commonalities in our methods and challenges, and showed them examples of the steps I took researching my books, including Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies (Candlewick, 2012).

F.B.I. letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. (National Archives, College Park, MD).

That book, and my talk, began with one of the two redacted versions of a letter that the F.B.I. sent to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and which the Civil Rights leader interpreted as an injunction to kill himself. I asked the students under what circumstances could our government have considered a note of this sort legal. Later in the book, I included the second version of the letter, which, seemingly randomly, blacked out new lines and restored others. The students in both schools jumped in with bright, apt questions and responses. And then, just a couple of days ago I saw this: Dr. Beverley Gage, a Yale history professor who is writing book on Hoover, had found a copy of the same letter with no editing/censoring at all. I quickly sent the link to my hosts at the two schools. It was just too perfect; the article collectively matched our class discussions. That was nice, but the real gold in this is what it tells us about history; the past keeps changing. New evidence yields new knowledge, or, at least nuances of what we once thought. And it’s not just documents that can produce this information. One of my favorite moments in talking about If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge (National Geographic, 2010) comes when I show a photo of a skeleton found buried very near the site. Strontium isotope testing, I explain, allows archeologists to determine the location of the soil that produced the grass eaten by the cows that produced the milk that the child drank as his or her teeth were being formed. Thus, we know from the skeleton’s teeth, that this person grew up in what is now Switzerland. New technology that explores deep into the structures of matter gives us new tools to examine the past. And then there are new perspectives—as when Adrienne Mayor (The Griffin and the Dinosaur, National Geographic, 2014) realized that the original descriptions of the legendary griffin read like factual accounts. After 10 years of research, Mayor determined these referenced a fossilized skeleton of the beaked, four-legged Protoceratops. New discoveries, new tools, and new perspectives constantly yield a new past—history is alive, coming into view right now. Reading about Dr. Gage’s discovery at Yale was a wonderful experience. It would be great to find more such treats on my computer after every school visit. In turn, I hope we can make sure that students see history as an adventure, a detective story, unfolding right now and not as a set of unyielding key points to be rehearsed and memorized for tests.