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When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.

What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.