Personal Narrative: My Interest In The Field Of American History

By the age of ten, I had developed a robust enthusiasm for the field of American history. Visits to my grandparents apartment in our hometown of Hempstead, Long Island would often lead me across the the street to the public library. It was there where I developed my bibliophilic nature. This was how I sojourned — it was through the bookshelves of history that I learned about topics ranging from the great Hannibal of Carthage and his legendary achievements in the Second Punic War to memorizing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to diving deeply into King’s theory on nonviolence coupled with the SCLC’s strategy to win equal rights for our people. This was my escape from the cacophonous noise that was my world, from all the things I would see or feel and yet could not comprehend. This was my calm during the storm, my peace that was to be still.
By the time I had reached High School, much of that pre pubescent fervor had ebbed. I was now a teenager more concerned with two of the things most boys coming of age fancy themselves with: girls and sports, …show more content…
I had won reelection as Senior Class President and now focused on ensuring that student rights and redresses were addressed in proper fashion along with my peers who had been voted by our classmates as representatives. It started off with our class trip, a battle we won by hijacking a School Board meeting with a large group of students and exposing a plot by the Deputy Superintendent at the time who was hellbent on preventing us from having any type of fun. It was a battle that gave us great pride because it showed the establishment that we could organize, state our case and present demands coherently. It was the first time that I had actually lead such a “movement” and while it was small in terms of overall struggles, I took personal solace and delight in the fact that our efforts had been successful. It ignited a flame that still burns to this