About Brad Cornelius

I guess you could say that I have always known that my life’s work would have something to do with history. Thanks to some exceptional history teachers, by my early teen years I had begun to express an intense curiosity about the past and an understanding of how an awareness of history could provide a deeper understanding of the issues facing my generation. In 1989, as a nineteen year old with career choices before me, history and contemporary events began to converge nightly on the television set as I watched the nightly news. While watching Berliners hammering away at the wall that had come to define an entire historical period, I realized that before events could be history they had to be news.

By 1990 I found myself working in the newsroom of WJXT in my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where I would remain until 2002. My love of history remained and given the events that dominated the nineties, I saw myself as part of a team that informed the public about history as it happened. My time at WJXT, a newsroom steeped in the rich tradition of parent company Washington Post/Newsweek, sharpened my writing skills and fostered an understanding of the importance of high quality journalism. Television newsrooms make for exciting workplaces, and the 1990s in Florida were particularly active as major hurricanes and historic presidential elections dominated the headlines. My journalistic experience over the years included:

• Serving as field producer for a statewide news network at the trial of Danny Rolling in Gainesville
• Working closely with former director of the National Hurricane Center Dr. Robert Sheets to write and produce television specials designed to increase hurricane preparedness in the state
• Interviewing numerous politicians, from both the Florida Legislature and the Florida congressional delegation, and working closely with staff members of the Chiles and Bush administrations
• Providing statewide and national political coverage in the wake of the presidential election of 2000
• Researching and writing consumer affairs stories and mediating disputes between business and consumers

Working in such a fast-paced and information-based industry provided me with a valuable skill set which includes the ability to meet short and long-term deadlines, writing and producing programs for broadcast, and a familiarity with digital audio and video recording.

As a supplement to my experience as a journalist, I also earned a BA in history along the way. In the process I came to recognize the importance of the academic pursuit of history and the usefulness of applying historiographic methodologies to the journalist’s examination of contemporary events. Following a three-year stint as a history educator, I found myself again drawn to the academic pursuit of history and obtained a Master of Arts degree in European history in the summer of 2009. My coursework and independent areas of interest focused on the process of industrialization in Europe and America through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and provide a firm foundation for understanding how individual businesses fit into the larger historical picture.

My historical philosophy is one that acknowledges the important role of ideas as a motivational force in history. The history of any business or corporation, larger or small, begins in the same way; an idea willed into existence through hard work and confidence. A corporate history can serve to preserve the powerful idea that is your company and insure the faithful transmission of the corporate culture built upon that idea to future generations of employees and management. If you are ready to insure that the history of you company or business is preserved forever, allow me to put years of academic and journalistic experience to work for you.