This was my first time writing on an archival artifact, it was a lot different too. I walked into this not knowing what I was going to write about at all. And honestly, I was not excited for it all, I was kind of dreading it. I went to a random table that I had no idea what the material was based on, and actually enjoyed researching it. The table I was at was student newspapers and old year books for Santa Clara. I started reading a very old yearbook and had no idea what it was about and my reaction was this:
But then I grabbed a old newspaper and I very interested really quickly. It was from 1982 and basically showed me how these students lived their lives in college way back then. I have always believed that I should be living in the 80’s as well, I feel like I would fit in. So it was interesting to see the amount of differences in the social norms. Even it basic un-written rules are completely different now, like the idea of an alcohol add such as this:
In todays era this would be frowned upon and maybe even investigated by some higher power most likely. But back then, this was just so normal, people didn’t get offended as easy, there were less unwritten rules. I mean they had people in prison writing letters to students in the student newspapers. I could never imagine that happening now.
To be honest I am kind of jealous of this time period.
From just reading articles in student newspapers I was able to obtain a lot of information on what the college society was like and got me very interested in life back then.