What was it like talking to so many park rangers and park lovers?
Burns: It’s living history, and the reason you didn’t like it is a combination of factors—for the last 50-plus years, the academic world has looked down its nose on narrative history. They’ve looked for other conceptual frameworks—economic, Marxist, deconstruction, semiotics—all of these things that essentially put a scrim between you and your ability to get it… and all of that trickled down into high school and elementary school, and you end up with people who weren’t good teachers forgetting that the word “history” is mostly made up of the word “story,” and story is essentially always the same—it’s one human being telling another human being something that happened. And that’s what we do—we go to other human beings and we say, “What happened?’” And when you interact with someone as passionate as a park ranger—they’re not there to make a fortune, they’re not there because this is the only thing they can do… they’re there because they want to be there and in order to do their job wel
