Besides teaching and researching, a history professor ought also to help build a community. For this goal I organized seventeen talks in Rochester, New York between Fall 2016 and Spring 2018. With a budget of $7,218, I managed to bring in five outside speakers (from Ithaca, Tucson, San Francisco, Toronto, and Poland), along with twelve local scholars. And through my vigorous promotion (poster design, catering arrangement, and community advertisement), nearly five hundred people attended these talks.
I believe that every dollar spent on promoting history and every audience member attracted to history talks could make a difference in our discipline’s prolonged fight for relevance in the public eye, and I hope this booklet can serve as a record of our collective memory of enjoying the charm and enigma of history.