Leo Spitzer oral history interview

The Scope and Contents note of this oral history was originally generated by feeding the electronic transcript into OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o on 2024 August 19. It was then reviewed and edited by a human.

Oral history interview with Leo Spitzer for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. Spitzer recounts his early life growing up in a refugee community in La Paz, Bolivia as the child of Austrian Jewish refugees before moving to New York City, where he recalls facing pressure to assimilate. He discusses his experiences as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and as a graduate student in Latin American and African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he became involved in activism opposing South African apartheid. Spitzer then details his experiences at Dartmouth after joining the faculty in 1967. He describes the rising anti-Vietnam War sentiment on campus, including his participation in protests that led to his arrest. Spitzer reflects on his time as a Dartmouth history Professor, where he helped develop the African and African-American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Women and Gender Studies programs, and participated in 1980s anti-apartheid activism on campus.