By: Abbie Minard ’20
Abbie Minard ’20 is a history concentrator with a primary interest in early American history. On campus, she is a research associate at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, music director and a DJ at WPRB, artistic director of the TapCats (tap dancing group), and a member of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. She is also a poet with a love for dada and experimental performance.
As a part the exhibition, Learning to Fight and Fighting to Learn: Education in Times of War, we digitized a half hour BBC radio broadcast from 1946 that featured Princeton University for an audio portrait of university life in the United States. The program, titled “An American University,” was one half of a radio exchange program with Oxford on the Mutual Broadcasting System.
The audio included in the segment was recorded in November and December as Princeton celebrated its bicentennial anniversary. It features a wide array of Princeton voices, covering university history, academics, residential, and social life, with spotlights on the football team and the glee club, whose musical interludes are interspersed throughout the program.
We selected photographs from our collections to accompany the audio for this video.