History, I thought. History would make the summer more interesting. The children were old enough to understand and, I hoped, to care about the monumental events, the social upheavals, the great and the forgotten that make up the living past. The old South. Slavery. The Civil War. We live, after all, in North Carolina. And who better than their parents to try to trace for them the intricate web of the understood and the misunderstood and the never-to-be-understood that make up history. History, I thought — if you want to call running with such a dangerous whim thinking.