The Danger of a Single Story, Sara Ford, August 4, 2024

There were some audio issues with this recording. The audio gets better at the 30 seconds mark. We are all familiar with the story of Henry David Thoreau and his two-year experiment on a plot of land owned by his teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. We are less familiar with the story of Harriet Jacobs, Thoreau's contemporary, who also, alone, entered a space that cut her off from society, and who also wrote a book about that experience. A look at these two experiences and the national appetite for one story, to be told in one, specific way in every school in the country for almost 200 years, and for the other not to be told at all gives us insights into the dangers of a single story, dangers that contort our history and uphold power in the same hands. Over, and over, and over again.