I am wondering, at this stage, how journaling in this more public mode has affected your thinking about the pandemic and your place as a historian? Do you think about your journal differently when you consider it as a piece of an emerging archive?
Prof. Susannah Ottaway
I have always journaled somewhat from the perspective of a historian. As a kid I would write entries like “I hope whoever comes back to read this will learn something interesting…” I have always used by journal more to address my observations about the world than my thoughts and feelings, but now this is further necessitated by the semi-public format.
I have so many thoughts about my journal. As someone who has researched extensively from journals, particularly those from Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, I have an unusual perspective on this moment in time. I do not think I am especially unique or significant, but neither did Mary Berg, or many others in history. In my experience trying to get interviews, I find that many people are uncomfortable thinking that their story is “valuable” or “unique” on a large scale, but of course every story is valuable and unique, just like every person is valuable and unique.
My last thought here is about my interview that I did yesterday. This was the first interview I have done, and I talked with Brynda McCoy, a woman who attends my church and whose daughter Daphne works as a dance teacher in Northfield. Brynda is in her 80s, and she told me about her own mother’s memories of the Spanish Flu… stories of the hearses coming and going past the graveyard in their home town of Five Points, Alabama. Brynda opened by saying “I don’t think I have much that’s interesting to say,” but I found that to be completely false. And she said that this is like nothing else she has lived through, not WWII, or 9/11. Those were horrible in their own rights, she said, but this level of disruption to everyone’s live is exceptional in her memory. And I found that troubling and powerful.
