In my last year of high school, I wrote a paper on government-run boarding schools for Native Americans. Books were quite hard to find. So I was thrilled to discover today, in the course of research for work, that primary source documents on the subject -- see the autobiographies of Zitkala-Sa, whose name I remember, and Ah-nen-la-de-ni -- have made their way online.

Carol Pixton, the American History teacher for whom I wrote this paper, has had a huge impact on my career. She allowed me to pick this very specific paper topic, indulging my interest in social and policy history; encouraged me to do in-depth research; provided us with lectures which modelled the actual practices of historians; praised the work I produced, and eventually recommended it for publication in the Concord Review (which I was too self-doubting to follow up on). Ms. Pixton had incredible enthusiasm for the topics she taught and a flair for making them come alive (studying the Cultural Revolution in her Chinese history class, we once held a criticism-self-criticism of the Latin class during which we denounced them as bourgeois pigs), and the longer I work close to social sciences the more I appreciate what that did for me. I'm humbled to remember that at the time I periodically snapped at her for being "too loud" in her 8 a.m. courses :\

One last note on the topic is my gratitude for Teh Intarweb. I can only hope that young students studying the same topic now find the particularly poignant memoir of Zitkala-Sa and can draw their own conclusions from it, perhaps in classrooms far from the university libraries where I had to look to find a scant few scholarly works on the subject.