About Me

History is the memory of things said and done. But that implies something most people don't stop to notice: someone has to decide which things get remembered. The choice is often invisible. Most people walk through a museum or open a textbook and assume they're getting the past as it was, when really they're getting the past as someone decided to tell it.

I’m one of those someones, and I’ve spent over a decade making those choices professionally.

In my daily work I take the monographs, graduate seminars, journal articles, and obscure 13th century manuscripts — all the complicated, fascinating, frequently uncomfortable stuff — and I rebuild it for the people who need it most and hear about it least. Eighth graders. museum visitors, state legislators, your neighbor who thinks the Civil War was about states' rights (“A state’s right to what? Darlene, don’t scamper behind the hydrangeas! A state’s right to what?!”). When I’m not working I might be cycling 1,400 miles down the Pacific Coast with my wife, solo-backpacking a random country, ranking and defending my top 100 film list, tabletop gaming with the same group of over a decade, or developing an unreasonable depth of knowledge about co-op shooters.

I’m Trevor Rhodes, and I’m a public historian — at least, that’s the shorthand. I work for state historical societies in the Midwest as an Interpretation and Content Specialist*, where I write curriculum, develop exhibit interpretation, and consult with communities across more than forty historic sites. The job is writing, researching, consulting, arguing, and occasionally standing in an archive at closing on a Wednesday trying to figure out what a small-town Ohio druggist was actually putting in those patent medicines in 1908. (Cocaine. It’s always cocaine.)

At its core, what I do is translate. I make history legible. I take the kind of scholarship that lives in academic journals nobody reads and I turn it into things that actual humans encounter in their actual lives. The question underneath all of it is the same one every time: who decided what story this place tells, and did they get it right?

Usually the answer is no. Not because anyone was lying, but because the stories that institutions tell tend to be the ones that make institutions comfortable, and comfort is not the same thing as truth.

I came to this work sideways. I grew up in California as the grandson of two prominent pastors and expected I’d be a preacher or a teacher. I spent my childhood reading encyclopedias, which in the nineties meant booting up Microsoft Encarta or grabbing an Eyewitness book. I taught K-12 social studies for several years and graduated from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2022 with my MA in History. I’m a social historian by trade, from the French Revolution and early modern European history to U.S. and Ohio history.

The throughline is that I have always wanted to know how everything works and why people do what they do. I want to understand the depth and breadth of the human experience. Somewhere between my philosophy degree, my history degree, and my years in the classroom, I picked up the notion that the past is not a settled thing. Every telling of it is a choice, and that those choices carry moral weight whether we acknowledge it or not.  Every choice about what to include, who to center, whose story to tell and whose to leave in the archive, those are ethical decisions, not just editorial ones. That’s why I do what I do, and I love it.

*All opinions on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of any organizations I work for.