We couldn’t have planned it better if we’d tried.
It all started back on April Fools’ Day. That’s when we initiated our 21-day campaign to engage the TTT&T community in the build-up to the unveiling, on 21 April, of Buried Alive: the Secret Michelangelo Took to His Grave. We appealed to all of you then to snap a selfie while holding the name of your #HistoryHero on a piece of paper and lots of you did!
Well, three unanticipated things happened off the back of that initiative that touched the hearts of my team members and me, and got our collective creative imagination flowing…
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It turned out to be a ton of fun for us history nerds to geek out on learning more about each of your cool characters, both past and present – many of whom we’d never heard of before!
As Becca started researching your heroes to highlight their contributions on our social media channels, she began to amass a library of fabulous images and, even better, great quotations from the heroes themselves.
That’s when the selfies gave way to what we are calling “quotages” – i.e., quote montages – that in May began to illustrate our Twitter and Facebook feeds, and which we used to start a Time Traveler Tours Instagram account. Check it out here.
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Then, as our #HistoryHero quotage and story library began to swell – it has now surpassed 100 characters – we started to feel the positive power of narrative as it vibrated in increasingly greater volume. And as that music grew, we understood that we perhaps had tapped an antidote to the negativity of today’s “loud little handful” – to borrow the term of one of your #HistoryHeroes, Mark Twain – that reverberates all too loudly in the world today.
There is so much inspiration, positive energy, and hope to be found in the collective stories of the lives and contributions of your #HistoryHeroes that we felt compelled to continue gathering them. And now it's our wish to share them as far and as wide as possible.
Hooray!
No sooner had we decided to distribute this collection of good vibes, than the newest member of Team TTT&T, Sarah Van Cleave, walked into our lives. A recent Brown University graduate and talented young writer in her own right, SarahVC joins our burgeoning collaboration to help us write, edit, and publish these gorgeous nuggets of gold;
first, as short blog posts;
then, as a podcast series;
finally, as an inspirational book.
