voices from the archive logoIn a previous post I’ve written about the powerful experience of bringing students into the Center for American War Letters Archive (CAWLA), which is located in the lower level of the Leatherby Libraries. In order to extend the reach of the archive experience further than the walls of my classroom, I’m collaborating with librarian Doug Dechow to do a weekly Facebook Live visit to the archives.  It’s our intention in the FB Live event to share some of the interesting letters held in the Archive, and to discuss how they might be used for scholarship within and beyond the classroom.  We welcome you to join us for these events, or to watch later.  To do so, please “Like” our Facebook page so you can follow along.  We will also be posting letter excerpts and images via Twitter if you prefer to follow along on that channel.

Here is what one of my students wrote about visiting the CAWLA:

Holding the correspondences of soldiers abroad in my hands was an incredibly moving experience. I now have the desire to do research and see if these authors ever made it back to Pier 17 in San Francisco, where they swore to meet after the war.

In this age of email and texts, which are often deleted after being read, we often forget the power that letters can have to preserve history…Even though it was time-consuming, I feel honored to have been entrusted with this small piece of World War II history…