Holocaust survivor Joe Engel is the 2016 CCHA Southern Division’s Distinguished Lifetime Humanities Educator/Advocate Award winner.

One of our big dilemmas lately is how to decide when is the best time to introduce our Legend of Zelda-playing, tablet-hoarding son to the Holocaust and other of history’s genocidal afflictions. Jake is mature for his age, a hard-working honors student who yearns for scientific fact, attacks math problems with relish, pens his own poetry, and reads adventure tales like Ed Stafford’s Walking the Amazon.

The horrors of the holocaust are simultaneously simple and complex. On its surface, it was nothing less than the state-sponsored, systematic murder of millions, mostly Jews (six million), but also several million Slavs and thousands of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Socialists, and the disabled.

As I began researching (and prepping) the course, I was confronted with a frequent problem for historians of medieval Europe: since the Viking Age ran from roughly 800 to 1100 CE and featured a pre-literate Scandinavian culture for much of that time, sources are almost non-existent, and there are many problems with those that do survive. This  makes the Vikings difficult for historians to pin down. And yet for my students, the Vikings had a very real and certain presence. When I asked them what their conception of a Viking was at the beginning of the class, an incredibly specific and unified picture emerged. It begged the question: what drives our fascination with these people who lived so long ago, about whom we know relatively little and yet who my students see very clearly and definitively? How is this historical disconnect possible? I was intrigued and began to think more (than I usually do as a professional historian) about how we engage with the past, how we tend to remake it in our own image and interests, and most importantly, why.

A few years ago, editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary came under fire after it was reported that they had deleted scores of words from their new edition—words about nature they no longer deemed relevant to childhood. Gone were acorn, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, nectar, pasture, and willow. In their place came blog, broadband, bullet-point, chatroom, cut-and-paste, and voicemail. Some were outraged by the news, seeing fresh evidence of a generation’s growing estrangement from the landscape, of its divorce from the natural world in a glut of virtual indoor activity. Others, however, defended the Oxford editors, noting that dictionaries are supposed to document usage, not dictate it. “Attacking a dictionary for removing archaic words,” wrote one critic, “is like punching your thermometer when it’s cold.”

Whatever your response, the episode highlights a growing cultural angst over how the digital age is changing our relationship to nature—evidenced by concerns about “Nature Deficit Disorder” or about whether millennials will care enough to protect our national parks in the future. The controversy also calls to mind the well-worn nature-vs-culture narrative, a bi-polar pattern of thought embedded in U.S. cultural life since at least the Wilderness Act of 1964. We have been trained to assume that the human and the natural are radical opponents in a zero-sum game: when one gains, the other loses. After all, the purpose of the Wilderness Act was to protect natural spaces from the technological fad of the day, the automobile. So roads, cars, and any motorized machines—now even bicycles—have been written out of the wilderness script. The famous legislation, decades in the making and now admired worldwide, sought to protect large areas of land that were “untrammeled by man,” retained a “primeval character,” and had “outstanding opportunities for solitude.” And it did this. Marvelously. But cognitively, it came at a price: We have tended to overlook the truth that humans are part of nature, and that nature and culture are better viewed as allies than enemies. Indeed, it took us decades to acknowledge that our very idea of wilderness is a unique blend of American frontier ideology and the Romantic sublime: a complicated, imperfect cultural invention that, among other ironies, had to evict or ignore Native Americans entirely.