In her entertaining memoir, I'm History...but do I repeat myself?, recently retired public school teacher Lee Knapp recounts the effects that an entirely new population on her old familiar high school campus had on her life. As a metaphor of America itself, her once nearly all-white alma mater-outside the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, no less-now boasted being one of the most diverse in the state, a state that led the Massive Resistance movement in the fifties to prevent this very thing from ever happening.

With deftness and humor, Knapp explores how her return expanded, if not exploded, the foundations of an identity that she had been constructing since graduating in America's bicentennial: her evangelicalism, her Southern heritage, her suburban community. Into this reexamination, Knapp engagingly weaves in moments from big history that, as Twain reminds us, may not repeat, but certainly rhyme with our current moment.