Abby Dow - Lepore Response

While I enjoyed reading Jill Lepore’s, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” I feel like overall it was a bit too academic to apply to my writing. I do not imagine becoming so close to the people/topic I am writing about to warrant concerns about becoming too close to them or feeling like I might “betray” them. That said, I did think the following quote was perhaps the most relatable to my topic: “Microhistorians do have particular non-biographical goals in mind: even when they study a single person’s life, they are keen to evoke a period, a mentalité, a problem” (132). For my topic, I am not studying a single person’s life. However, I am studying how Everett Koop’s decision to come out in support of HIV/AIDS education changed the way sex education was taught. As I get closer to my topic, though, I notice that the story of his decision to say what he did, the reactions to his statements, and the concrete changes his statement inspired are emblematic of a larger question of the time: how the conflicting ideology of the left and the New Right wrestled to take control as the nation faced pressing problems. In this sense, perhaps my paper is somewhat of a microhistory, though I am not assuming that Koop’s life serves as an allegory, but rather that this specific instance is an allegory of a larger historical phenomenon.

One of the other main themes that emerged for me from this was a worry that I will put Everett Koop on a pedestal - a phenomenon that Lepore cautions of in the piece. When I originally identified him as a major player, I was amazed by his willingness to come out against the wishes of his conservative administration and advocate for what he did. It will be important, though, as I write this paper, to question the motivations of his decision, as well as to consider whether his push was in fact productive, or whether it further villainized pre-marital sex and homosexuality in terms of the way the education system addresses these issues.