I began giving the short version I used at gatherings. Then she asked a second question, and a third, until I realized she actually wanted to know.
I told her about students changing their minds.
Not dramatically. Sometimes a child who claimed history was pointless stayed after class to ask what happened to a person we had mentioned. Sometimes an argument about a decision made centuries earlier became the first time someone noticed that people in the past had not known what would happen next.
“That’s what I like,” I
