The Rationale for The Bat of Minerva

In the mid-1990s, I started a television show on regional cable in Minneapolis and St. Paul, The Bat of Minerva. Since then, my life has been entwined with the form and content of that show and with the archive it has generated. The rationale for this enterprise has grown and changed over twenty years. One milestone in its development was an interview I did on the show's twelfth anniversary with my student Mary Callahan as interviewer. Another was an University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study panel on oral history, which gave me an opportunity to compare and contrast my approach with those of oral historians.