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Sarah Stouffer-Lerch: "I want Missourians to be more in touch and more in tune with their history."

Becca Newton
/
KBIA

Sarah Stouffer-Lerch spoke with Missouri on Mic team on the Fourth of July. She’s an Ohio State University student who interned at the State Historical Society of Missouri.

She spoke about how she fell in love with studying history.

Missouri on Mic is an oral history and journalism project documenting stories from around the state in its 200th year.

Sarah Stouffer-Lerch: I'm a student at Ohio State University. I intern at the State Historical Society of Missouri, here in Columbia.

So, I'm specifically trying to focus on the Moberly Housing Authority – trying to learn just housing, public housing in general, and try to educate people on that to my article.

I got really into Archives and History during the pandemic – I needed something to do, and cooking was something that I love to do.

And so, when I was looking for more recipes to cook, I came across my great aunt's self-published cookbook.

And there was a lot of stories in there that I had never heard of about my family's history and some of the things they had done, and so, in that process, I decided to digitize a cookbook because it was kind of falling apart, and from there, I got really interested in the preservation of history – interesting things like that.

So, to me, history is so important, especially as an African American.

Whenever I think about archives, I think about how we can bring to light stories that have not been told, or stories that typically are not seen in mainstream.

Becca Newton
/
KBIA

So, I think preserving history is a way that we can tell those stories and let people know that their histories and their ancestors are important.

I actually considered Missouri part of the south from like a cultural and geographical perspective.

And so, coming here, I quickly learned that Missourians consider Missouri to be part of the Midwest actually, which was interesting to me and kind of changed how I thought about Missouri as a state.

And all the people that are in it, just based on the difference between Midwest and South – you always think certain things about the South and certain things about the Midwest.

And so learning that Missouri, from the perspective of Missourians is part to the Midwest, that can really change how you how you conceptualize a state.

I want Missourians to be more in touch and more in tune with their history, not just from, like a surface level, but really like utilizing their historical societies and their local communities and asking the people who work they like about their jobs and what they do and a daily basis, you know?

I think I would like to see more people understand what it is that archivists and historians and conservators do on a daily basis, and really coming to understand the history more as a result of that greater understanding.

There are, like literally like thousands of documents in your local historical society archives, and I'm sure you can find the answer or find a different train of thought that you didn't know you were looking for before.

So please, please, if you do anything, if you're searching for any answer to something, and you can't find it, like I'm sure you can find it at an archives.

Beibei Liu is a student producer for KBIA's Missouri on Mic.
Becca Newton is a student reporter and producer at KBIA. They will graduate from the University of Missouri in spring 2022 with a degree in Multimedia Convergence Journalism and minors in Peace Studies and History.