When I took Apartheid: Then and Now last year for my COLL 100, we watched many documentaries with people who had lived through apartheid, suffered from its effects, and agitated against it. The fact that we could learn directly from them what it was like to live in that time was amazing to me. Perhaps their stories were filtered through their own experiences and their own imperfect memory, but that made them more authentic (although some criticize oral histories because of these flaws). This weekend was all about oral history, since the whole point of our project was that we were interviewing the Legacy 3 to discover more about the academic, residential, and social spaces they experienced. The chance to speak with them about their time here personally was amazing – they were all very sweet, accommodating, and personable. Rather than being vague historical figures, we were able to interact with them as the people they are, and discover that they all know how to tell a good story and have great laughs. Ari Weinberg, one of the grad students we worked with this weekend, said that she was interested in the history of memory. I liked that phrase – “the history of memory.” What we were doing by transcribing their words was writing a history of the College of William & Mary made up of their memories.
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