Sarah (Sadie) Tournour just graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore with a double major in history and environmental studies and a minor in Arabic studies. Along with a stellar GPA, she won the Phi Beta Kappa Brooke Pierce Award in the Humanities and Social Science; the Calvin Prize in History; and the Goucher Environmental Studies Prize. She was drawn to WWHP because of its "ongoing commitment to documenting the history of working women and making their narratives accessible to the public."  What she saw in WWHP's mission dove-tailed with her passion for women's history, the history of gender and sexuality, and labor history. Her goal is to create podcasts using some of our collected stories about women, labor, and how they intersect.

Podcasts, in Sadie's mind, can be part of the process of creating a more accurate history. She credits two courses at Goucher College for developing her current understanding of history: "Thinking historically and studying history means using your imagination and thinking critically to try and empathize with people far removed from you in time and place."  She also recognizes that what we take for granted as "history" is the narrative that has been written by those in power. "The role that power plays in the construction of history/historical memory is so great that, for me, the study of history is synonymous with the study of how power operates."  Unless there is a way to make it possible for multiple historical actors to tell their stories, that dominant narrative will not change.  

For people to think critically about the narratives they read or hear, they need information. "My biggest frustration as a history student was how inaccessible a lot of the material I was studying was to the general public." Her answer is to pursue the field of public history, a history that makes information available through museums, historically-based entertainment, monuments/memorials, and more. In other words, it is a history that is not limited to academia.