eDiary
Best entry in my journal from 1968- 1972: January 20, 1969 – We were so caught up in the inauguration of
"How quaint...or is this kind of lame? thought artist Lee Knapp after she half-heartedly returned to teach history at her old public high school. Because her private history was in a state of upheaval, she felt she had no choice.
On her once nearly all-white campus outside of Richmond, Virginia, Knapp found a new, wildly diverse population of students walking its old sidewalks. They would expand and even explode the foundations of an identity that she had been constructing since graduating in America's bicentennial: her evangelicalism, her Southern identity, her community. Knapp engagingly weaves in moments from big history that, as Twain reminds us, may not repeat, but certainly rhyme with out current moment.
Educator and entrepreneur Lee Knapp was born in 1957, the loudest reverberation of the Baby Boom. She was raised in suburban Richmond, Virginia where the symbols and legacy of the Civil War defined that city. After graduating from high school in America’s bicentennial year, she went on to study history at the historic College of William and Mary, where it was not uncommon to see Patrick Henry, George Wythe, or James Monroe throwing back beers at the Greenleaf Cafe before riding their mopeds off towards Jamestown Road. Despite a professor’s admonition that “there’s no future in history,” Knapp’s life has been unavoidably circumscribed by it.
After graduating from college, Knapp began teaching history in her home county in 1980 and by 1986 had three sons. She took a seventeen year hiatus from education during which she began an art business, creating whimsical teapots, relief sculptures of area colleges, and precise architectural replicas of private homes and a few public buildings out of clay.
In early 2003, she published a book of fifteen essays through Baker Books called Grace in the First Person. In the fall of that year, she returned to a classroom at her alma mater to teach modern European and US history, and later a class called Theory of Knowledge, essentially epistemology, as part of the rigorous International Baccalaureate program. In 2008, she launched her second business, grammarRULES! (grammarstuff.com), a line of plates, mugs, and greeting cards that addresses grammatical pet peeves with a wry, slightly judgmental tone.
Knapp retired from public education in 2021 and now lives in rural Virginia, reveling in the beauty of the horses and mountains across the street. She also revels in the beauty of the lives of her boys and their families, who still endlessly fascinate her.
Best entry in my journal from 1968- 1972: January 20, 1969 – We were so caught up in the inauguration of