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On May 27, Bryn Mawr awarded 167 bachelor of arts degrees. Sixty percent of the class was headed straight to graduate or professional school. My friends and teachers had assumed I would go to law school, but I could not imagine devoting myself to the details of torts or civil procedure. If I decided to pursue further education, I knew it would be for graduate work in history. What had always captured me intellectually was the broad sweep of ideas and social forces. And having grown up in a changing and not-changing Virginia, I knew how those assumptions and circumstances exerted their power through time, often creating silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility. From at least when I had written to Eisenhower as a nine-year-old, I had recognized the force and the burden of history; I understood the words of the white southern poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren: “History is what you can’t / Resign from.”11 Coming to terms with the past would ultimately become an intellectual and professional commitment as well as a personal necessity. I grew up to be a historian. My page in the Bryn Mawr college yearbook, 1968. On my right wrist I am wearing the bracelet my grandmother gave me the night my mother died. But not yet. I had decided I needed to be in the real world for a while. I had loved school since I began kindergarten at the age of four, and at Bryn Mawr I had become caught up not just in learning
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