Early on in my career at Kent State University, I wondered out loud, not as the leader of the university, but with my historian’s hat on, when “people,” that is, members of the general public, would no longer know anything about the shootings on our campus in May 1970. I said this to a retired Kent State professor who witnessed the shootings, and her response was rightfully indignant: how dare I suggest the event and its lessons would ever fade from memory.More recently, a public official in Ohio asked me, “When are people up there going to get over that event?” And by that the person meant, w...