Welcome to Centre Trail, the online platform for the History Program at Centre College, a small and selective liberal arts college in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky.
We set up this website, and the weekly podcast that will accompany it, to fulfill a few different goals. Primarily, at least in broad terms, we feel strongly that historians should both seek to communicate their knowledge to wider audiences and continuously rethink how we talk to each other and to our students. What that means, in essence, is that we want to produce different types of content. We want to write blog posts and record podcasts and talk about how we teach, what we research, and our fields of expertise in ways that we hope will be accessible. Not just accessible, in fact, but interesting!
We named this site after Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail that runs through Central Kentucky. We want this site and podcast to provide visitors with an interesting pathway toward new knowledge and ideas. The name is also a nod towards our teaching philosophies; helping students interpret the past and make their own trail of ideas. In particular, it is important to help people understand that the history of the world, far from being an entirely known record of the past, is something that evolves from one piece of writing to the next, from Pulitzer Prize winning books to undergraduate essays. We think that’s an exciting thing, and we look forward to writing and talking about it.
Centre Trail 