Michael Burchett
Assistant Professor of History
PRESENTATIONS
The community of higher education is a forum of fact and faith, where some truths reside in the numbers and some in the mist, but the search for truth is a unique aspiration. It is a lively and often contentious argument over the nature of truth. It is a museum of ideas once fresh and energizing but now quant and outmoded. It is the home of our hope, where scholars labor to solve those problems that rob men and women of their dignity , their promise, and their joy, It is a conversator of the record of our nobbily and our barbarism. It is the theater of our artistic impulses. It is a forum where dissent over purpose and performance, may be seen as evidence that higher education is meeting its responsibly for asking what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. It is a place where all in the community-student, faculty, and staff- are called to ask what brings meaning to their loves and makes them glad to be alive. It is, above all, community in which we celebrate the humanizing force of our curiously and wonder.
Often marginalized peoples left few records and what is known about them came from their enemies and conquerors. In some instances there is an additional problem: myths, legends, and folklore in enormous quantities muddy the records of famous figures. Tecumseh is one such example. His contemporaries left numerous accounts but self-serving entries from his enemies, friends, politicians, and others abound in the extant record. As time passed, layer upon layer of additional commentary further
clouds the past as sloppy scholarship adds even more noise. Sorting through the morass requires diligent scholarship and attention to detail. One of the premiere Tecumseh scholars, John Sudgen, argues, that it is not a paucity of sourcing but an overabundance of dubious records and interpretations spread over the past that makes Tecumseh research difficult. Over the summer I gave a lecture to the Honors Program at Ohio Christian University about the methodologies deployed by historians when the past is murky due to inadequate source material. After the lecture, we went to the local play and examined some of the ways these creep into popular understandings of the past. The article below was published on the OCU website.
Lecture - Myths, Legends, and Folklore: Barriers or Avenues to Historicity
