Brenda Silver oral history interview

The Scope and Contents note of this oral history was originally generated by feeding the electronic transcript into OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 on 2024 February 7. It was then reviewed and edited by a human.

Oral history interview with Dartmouth Professor Brenda Silver for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, about Silver's Vietnam War-era activism and subsequent academic career. Silver begins by describing her early life growing up in the Philadelphia area. She discusses her undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a Fullbright Scholarship and graduate studies at King's College, London and Harvard University. She describes her growing political consciousness abroad and her participation in the anti-war Aldermaston march. Silver relates her continued involvement in anti-war demonstrations upon returning to the U.S, including the 1970 March on Washington, D.C. She discusses the challenges she faced as a female faculty member at Dartmouth College, including resistance to establishing a women's studies program, which she was ultimately able to establish with the support of President John Kemeny. Post-Vietnam War, Silver details her political activism in opposing South African Apartheid and the Dartmouth Review's actions. She ends by discussing the importance of continued activism in light of current political challenges and shares a moment of reconciliation witnessed during a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.