Olivia Loudon '25 Learns the Importance of History During Archival Internship
Name: Olivia Loudon
Class Year: 2025
Major: History
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
Internship Organization: William Way Community Center
Location: Philadelphia, Pa.
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
I’ve been spending this summer going through 75 photo albums of a man named Bill Goldberg. Goldberg was a gay man and a performer who often performed in drag as “Mame.” He owned a secondhand clothing shop that sold vintage clothing, and he acted as background characters in both movie and theatrical productions. A good chunk of the photos come from his middle age life, and the parties that he attended or hosted with friends. Another sizable chunk comes from his work in drag shows as “Mame.” There’s not much information about the very beginning of his life, or the very end, though my boss and I have been attempting to correct that.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I've visited the archives before, and have been researching there for my thesis previously. I love their collections and I appreciate that they're cataloging history that would normally be forgotten.
What has been your favorite part of this internship?
We’re in the process of attempting to interview a few friends of Bill's, and I’m currently cataloging the photo albums in the system. We’ve also been conducting ancestry searches, in an attempt to figure out where exactly Bill spent his early life. It’s a difficult search, but we’re making progress, and I’m actually having a lot of fun doing the digging. I’ve always loved detective stories, and it feels like I’m almost solving a mystery.
What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn't expect?
It’s really rare to have this much material about someone who wasn’t a celebrity or a public figure. Bill lived through the AIDS epidemic, but many LGBT people didn’t, and because of the discrimination at the time, a lot of people’s legacies were lost. Even outside of the AIDS epidemic, people in the LGBT community often didn’t have the privilege of being remembered as their true selves. Historians have had to put together the pieces, often after they’ve been deliberately tampered with for “morality” reasons. But with Bill, we have a large section of his life that’s been preserved, and that’s an incredible resource.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
I'm learning about the process of cataloging and archiving, entering things into the system and creating databases. It's important to understand the technical side of archival work.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced at your internship?
Probably some of the paywalls that websites have when I'm trying to research!
What is most rewarding about your internship?
There’s a very good reason why I majored in history: When you study history, you learn very quickly that having history is a privilege. Not everyone can afford to have their lives recorded and cataloged, and some even suffer from having their histories deliberately erased. There’s a very serious consequence to this: Denying the history of a marginalized community makes it that much easier to attack and discriminate against them in the modern day, as if their existence is an abnormal and new phenomenon. This internship, and these archives, help to disprove that idea.
Through the Career and Civic Engagement Center Beyond Bryn Mawr Summer Internship Program, Bryn Mawr students pursue opportunities in fields such as nonprofits, government and law, health care, research, sciences, business, and the arts. Thanks to the generosity of our alumnae/i and donors, over 150 students across all academic departments are funded to pursue unpaid internships or research experiences in the U.S. and abroad each year.