History, Historical Context, and Wyoming History

   Of History and Human Needs . . .
        This is a short perspective that will hopefully help the reader take "history" beyond a compilation of facts to a search for meaning and understanding, not just of distant events and people but of our own lives today and how history connects to us.

    The Problem of Historical Context
        A key way that we understand the past has to do with the way we put events and developments together so that we can understand how they compared with what came before and after and how they can illuminate (and be illuminated by) similar developments elsewhere.

    Historic Preservation and Wyoming
        In this Introduction, "Touching the Past in Wyoming," to Wyoming's Statewide Historic Preservation Plan (2007), I explore some of the potential and richness, as well as importance, of the physical elements of Wyoming history that are left and how we can protect them.