This marks the fundamental difference between us as historians. Robbie believes every minor detail tells part of a greater story, while I see instead the stories people make up to justify what has happened. Even when, as with East Braxton, there is nothing that can justify it.

There is a powerful scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved  where Baby Suggs invites children, men, and women to laugh, to dance, and to cry.

Later, syntax clogged and clotted, / wrecked my clean lines, pulsed / on the page distinct as inkblots. 

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Margaret Ronald's "The Innocence of a Place."