Princeton Lives and Legacies

Who do we choose from history to build a legacy for, and why?

Below are our answers to this question after working on this digital project.

A Note from Savannah:

Attempting to answer this posed question as the co-creator of the site Princeton Lives and Legacies, I am urged to say that it still remains slightly unanswered. While we brought to life the stories of five unique individuals who each made their mark on the history of Princeton, and who the archival libraries will keep alive in years to come, there was no significant factor beneath the legacy of these individuals. All hailing from different lifestyles, upbringings, and heritages, our five alumni shared nothing but the fact that they associated themselves with this University and had a passion for what they loved and stood for. Going into this project with the hopes of synthesizing a factual answer to why history highlights certain people, we have come out with an answer that may be unsatisfactory but is equally compelling. Raising its own questions for further research, the answer I found while working through this assignment is that every giant in history has more sides than what may be present, and it is essential to dig a little deeper and review the intersection of their public and private selves. I sincerely hope that our viewers find interest in this question and our site, and I leave it to the influence of the world wide web with high hopes to promote role models throughout history who are showcased as real, genuine, and human in the near and far future.

A Note from José Pablo:

Much like Savannah wrote, there really is not any single reason for how and why people’s legacies are built up as they have been with the five individuals studied in this project. Of course, there is a common factor of prominence and great contributions: all five individuals were highly achieved giants at Princeton. However, each individual’s legacy has taken very different forms as they have developed over time since as far back as the late 1800s to as recently as the past few years. And, even if it is not easy to pinpoint an exact cause for a legacy’s development, there at least are a few shared traits that can be identified. First, all five individuals’ legacies seem to have been solidified into a stable form in a short period of time around each of their deaths. By this, I mean that legacy-building seems to be an immediate act around the time of death, and the legacy formed immediately after an individual’s death is long-lasting and unlikely to radically change, especially as more time passes. Most memorials and honors on campus were made within about a generation of an individual’s death and before their relevancy waned — though there is no identical timeframe for how fast or how much it wanes. However, this project shows that legacies do change, which leads to the second shared trait.

Legacies can continue to grow long after an individual’s death, but it takes a grand effort and a practically radical change in perspective for an individual’s legacy to develop in a new direction. Wilson and Guyot serve as examples here. The movement to remove Wilson’s name from parts of campus and generally rethink his legacy took prolonged efforts that did not fully succeed until the issue was highly relevant with the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. This catapulted the Wilson issue into the Princeton community’s consciousness, increasing Wilson’s relevance in a way that made big changes to his legacy possible. Guyot, on the other hand, serves as an example of a similar change but that has not yet happened. As discussed in his post, Guyot contributed to scientific racism, but Princeton has indicated an intent to maintain the Guyot Hall name even if in a different location. Despite some recent attention to the issue in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Guyot’s legacy has not reached a high enough level of relevancy again to be subject to great shifts in how he is remembered and honored like Wilson’s legacy did.

Overall, legacy building, its preserving, and its change are inconstant things that are challenging to generalize, but hopefully this project has shown that some shared traits can be identified. Hopefully, this project has also pushed the individual reading this to want to investigate more of the legacies embedded in the physical space of the Princeton campus.