Why we tell the told

BY CARLY SNYDER

Students who made this magazine witnessed some of the more tumultuous events in history.

We started our first years in college or completed high school taking some of our classes remotely over Zoom because of the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We watched on our phones as supporters of former President Donald Trump rioted, scaling the front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, before breaking down doors and storming through the hallways of Congress. And, for those of us who were on campus during the 2020-21 academic year, we grappled with the implications of keeping a reference to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the name of our university.

All the events we experienced are now part of history. But who will tell that history? Who will be left out?

For our generation, it matters. Social media has exposed us to multiple identities and causes since we were in elementary school. As a result, many of us understand the impact when voices go unheard.

Growing up with social media has meant that information has come at us in the form of soundbites and fragments.

We heard some people say the COVID-19 pandemic was a public health and safety crisis. For others, it was a conspiracy and hoax.

We heard some people say the attack in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, represented nothing more than a show of support for Trump. For others, it was an attack on our democracy.

And in 2020, a year characterized by murders of innocent Black people by police, students and faculty urged W&L’s Board of Trustees to remove Lee from the name of the university, which has honored him since 1870.

Through it all, many of us realized that understanding and telling history is much more complex than the pages of a history book make it seem.

How could a history book recount history and every identity behind each story?

There is no way to know what we do not, until we do. But our generation seems to realize that there is an opportunity to include more voices in the narrative of history.

“Learning other perspectives grounds our own lives,” wrote Jake Winston, a student in the Historical Memory class.

Winston says he enrolled in the course to learn about political history. But he says the class taught him much more.

“No other class is going to allow you to hear such personal accounts from people and then translate it into how they live with past experiences and reckon with it every day,” he said in an interview.

My class, Editing for Print and Online Media, also learned there is more to history than we’ve been taught before in other college and high school classes.

We also now know our relationship with and understanding of history is a journey.