Burgos: How Negro Leagues legend Alex Pompex inspired a future historian

From SABR member Adrian Burgos Jr. at La Vida Baseball on Spetember 3, 2017:

Indiana Jones movies always intrigued me — the idea of interacting with the past and examining artifacts. The movies in some way influenced why I became a history professor.

The past is with us. As William Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In the classroom, I tell students that history is a relationship between those of us in the present and those in the past — an understanding influenced by the work of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

Yes, what happened in the past happened. What changes is our understanding of why or how it happened.

But this is not the lecture hall, not my undergraduate seminar. It’s a story about the feeling of chasing ghosts, or of being chased by history.

Read the full article here: https://www.lavidabaseball.com/alex-pompez-woodland-cemetery-ghosts/#.Wa1k6KGeaLw.twitter



Originally published: September 5, 2017. Last Updated: September 5, 2017.