You're Witnessing History: Minnesota Historians Need Your Help to Document the Pandemic As It Happens

Decades from now, historians may look back at 2020 and say that was the year that we stopped shaking hands.

Or the year that working from home became the norm.

Or the year Americans stopped being squeamish about bidets.

History is always happening, of course, but it’s clear that we’re cursed to be living in particularly interesting times, so interesting that they may become a watershed, a dividing line of our lives: before the pandemic, after the pandemic.

That’s why historians around the state and the country aren’t waiting to begin documenting the impact of this global crisis.

While the pandemic has been raging, curators, historians and archivists at institutions from the Minnesota Historical Society to Carleton College have been gathering blog posts, journal entries, photographs, drawings, videos and artifacts like handmade masks and T-shirts.