Wilmington University History adjunct Michael Dixon teaches students how to conduct investigations into a well-hidden past.
In Michael Dixon’s case, he was indeed made by history. For him, even from childhood, history has been and continues to be his life.
But not history of the high and mighty, though Dixon, an author, writer, speaker and Wilmington University history adjunct, has encountered presidents and ambassadors on his ongoing journey through the past. Instead, he says, his focus “is the history of understudied people, everyday people, those you don’t find in textbooks or chapters of 19th-century history.”
In other words, the rest of us.
Dixon says his purpose is to encourage our interest in local historical events and places, and help preserve that knowledge and, in doing so, create a bridge between past and present for us to enjoy and learn.
His knowledge of several subjects is extensive — Prohibition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the Cold War, the C&D Canal, the Mason-Dixon Line, the building of the Conowingo Dam (the construction that cost the lives of at least 20 people) — and also subjects many have shied away from in the past or that were simply forgotten or ignored, like unsolved murders of small-town police officers or lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is always interested in learning more about topics he comes across in his many travels around the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond.
The article continues on WilmU, the Official Magazine of Wilmington University
