Sharing History: David Kilroy and Students Join “Soul of the People” Exhibit
College Spotlight on Faculty Mentorship
As a history student studying the Great Depression, Patrick MacVittie was intrigued by the parallels between 1938 and 2008, when economic turmoil, failing financial institutions, and rising unemployment had a catastrophic impact on people’s lives.
“Almost every day, Professor Kilroy would tell us, ‘read this newspaper article,’ and we would see how what was happening paralleled with what we were reading about in class. It was striking,” MacVittie said of the Great Depression course taught last fall by David Kilroy, Ph.D., associate professor in the Division of Humanities at the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences.
MacVittie along with classmates Stefanie Sundberg and Ryan Nicol (who graduated this spring) pursued their interest in history by seeking faculty mentorship to help them develop and present scholarship and research, a valuable experience encouraged by the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences. The three history majors assisted Kilroy when he presented “South Florida and the WPA Oral History Project" during a historical exhibition this spring.
The exhibition was organized by the Alvin Sherman Library and was held in conjunction with “Soul of a People: Writing America's Story,” a new television documentary about the Federal Writers’ Project, an outgrowth of the Work Projects Administration (WPA).
Kilroy discussed the vision of Benjamin A. Botkin, Ph.D., a pioneering American folklorist and scholar who served as national folklore editor and chairman of the Federal Writers' Project from 1938 to 1941.
Under Kilroy’s guidance, Sundberg, MacVittie, and Nicol read to the audience the stories of six South Floridians who lived during the Depression and who were interviewed 70 years ago by writers hired for the WPA project.
In preparation for the presentation, the students researched and edited the historical documents, prepared an introduction, and presented the oral histories as a supplement to his presentation, Kilroy said.
“The project helped them clarify how to interpret documents and how to use documents effectively,” Kilroy said. “It exposed them to archival information. Part of the value of the project was to put the original documents in their hands and encourage them to think about the documents within the context of the Great Depression class.
“The material they encountered a direct resonance to the economic crisis they were experiencing first hand. In addition, the meeting exposed them to an audience that included a number of individuals who had lived through the Depression era,” Kilroy said.
Growing Through Faculty Mentorship
The Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences encourages this type of undergraduate scholarship, participation, and faculty mentoring in numerous ways. The opportunity to present at a university or public event is an exciting and challenging process that helps students develop research and critical thinking skills, establish collaborative relationship with faculty members, and present their work at conferences, symposiums, and exhibits
"Student participation in this event clearly supports the university’s stated mission of ‘fostering intellectual inquiry, leadership, and commitment to community through engagement of students and faculty members in a dynamic, life-long learning environment,’” Kilroy said. "These students had an opportunity not just to engage in intellectual inquiry directly with a faculty member but to demonstrate leadership and engage the community (this was after all a public event) through their presentations.”
The students discovered there was much to gain by their participation.
"My participation allowed me to attend a lecture I likely would not have attended otherwise," Sundberg said. "I found it to be enlightening. Aside from the material presented, it was really interesting to see the demographics of who attended. It was refreshing to see that history appeals to everyone."
Having the opportunity to present in front of an audience was important, she said.
“Being comfortable presenting is vital to not only a successful academic career but also vital to professional careers,” Sundberg said. "Regardless of major, chosen career paths, or anything else, speaking to an audience is an inevitable part of the life. Practice makes perfect."Parallels of Economic Hardship
The students found the stories of Floridians living through hard times to be poignant. The subjects included a Conch woman from Riviera Beach, a Cuban immigrant who saw the violence of the Klu Klux Klan in Key West, and a real-estate speculator who made a fortune in Florida land deals only to lose everything following the deadly hurricane of 1926.
"It was people talking about their experiences, how they survived, what they were doing," MacVittie said. "One was a gentleman who came down to Florida to invest, a man who made tons of money in banking up North. When the stock market crash happened, he lost everything. Somebody who had been that successful in business, all of a sudden having nothing left and nothing for his children.
"We made comments about how familiar it was to what was happening now…and how these people must have felt losing everything."
The Work Projects Administration was a New Deal program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress in 1935 to put people back to work. During its existence, the WPA employed 8.5 million people to build public projects, such as building bridges, dams, and highways.
Writers, too, were employed to create state guidebooks and interview local residents for folk life surveys, which would record historical snapshots of their everyday life and struggles. Several of these writers would become literary notables, including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Studs Terkel, and Eudora Welty.
"The material gathered during the Writers' Project is a great historical legacy," Kilroy said. "Historians have gone back and dusted off these documents and found a treasure trove. You really get a sense of the human element of the Great Depression from this material. There is so much documentary evidence that we have a better sense of what life was like in the 1930s than almost any other decade in American history."
Students saw many parallels between then and today.
"I would come into class every day with newspaper headlines: the stock market falling, banks closing. They were stunned by the parallels,” Kilroy said. “It was eerie. No two time periods can be the same but there are definitely lessons to be learned from the past."
Among those lessons: "That history matters!” Kilroy said. "Our students are learning not just about what happened in the past but more importantly how it is relevant to informing our behavior in the present and our planning for the future. By exposing students to primary source documents such as the ones used in this presentation they become more aware of universal themes in the human story and more appreciative of the role of previous generations in shaping the society they live in today."
