See, Hear

History and Broadcasting and Cinema students blended this fall for a course in “Doing Visual History.” Watch some of the students' final video clips below.

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Text Transcripts

Soldier Story Video Transcript
I knew that I had been there four months without washing. I won't say this was something to brag about, but we talked about it a lot. In the infantry, you just don't have an opportunity to do that. I had an opportunity though to go with the major to division headquarters to pick up some papers or some documents or something, so I rode along with him.

I'd never seen division headquarters, not in the field, not in that environment. And when we went there what was striking to me was that they had this field mess facility they had actually created. It was nice. And they had field laundry facilities and a filed wash and shower facility as well. I can remember, I was so dirty, and the food. It kinda got kinda depressing, you know. We were eating repetitively, drinking a lot of guava milk, long shelf-life guava milk. I won't touch it today. But I can remember drinking warm milk, that sucked, and it was guava flavored too. I remember drinking this warm guava milk, and they tried to break us of eating our MRE's too often because it was bad for your digestion to eat 'em every day.

But when we went to division headquarters, it was amazing. I stripped naked immediately and got me a shower. I got my clothes washed. I went to the mess facility, and you go through the line and pick what you want. They had steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs! And I said, “Which one can I get?” He said, “Man, get as much meat as you damn want.” So I piled up. Then I said, “How 'bout a piece of fruit?” And he said, “How about a bag.” He gave me a bag of fruit. And I ate and I ate.

I took that bag of fruit with me back to my unit, and I was smellin' clean, smellin' like aftershave. And it was, “Ah, you smell funny. What's going on? What'd you do?” I said, “I took a shower, I ate and I brought you guys back a bag of fruit. “And man they loved it; they loved it! I didn't have an orange peel even left.

Re-enactment Video Transcript
The longer we were there that weekend, the more it started sinking in of the bitter end that those fellas must have faced. I remember the Sunday morning we had the battle of — oh, what was the battle? Oh, it was the last battle before they got to Appomattox and it was where Lee lost about a third of his army on the retreat from Petersburg. Sailor's Creek. But it was a good fight. We had a lot of fun doin' it. We ran up and down, oh about three mountains trying to get away from the Yankees, but it was fun.

On Sunday morning, we knew what we were gonna do. We were gonna walk up to the top of the hill, stack our arms in front of the federal troops and march off. Leave everything. You know, we were down there in the bottom, out of view of the crowd. We probably had thirty-five hundred total re-enactors, about half and half. So they had 1,500 Confederate troops down there at the bottom, and they had us all lined up by our battalions and everything. We’re just all talking and all the sudden this fella rides up on his horse. And he goes up to the commander down there at the bottom, gets off his horse, salutes him, hands him a piece of paper. And he handed him General Order No. Nine, which was Lee's farewell address.

Well. He comes over to us and proceeds to read this thing to us, and says it has come straight from Lee. We’re all sittin' there and it just dawned on me what we were doing. I saw these grown people around me in tears. There's a 17-year-old boy beside me and he starts weeping. It was like it was contagious.

I saw down to our right. And what those fellas did when they surrendered was instead of surrendering the flags what they did was cut them up into little pieces and put them in their jackets or whatever so they could take the flag home without surrendering it. And there were some fellas down there, they had one of these expensive cotton flags, and they proceeded to pull out a pair of scissors and cut it up to give it to all the guys in their unit. And I was like, wow, this is really hittin' home.

Greensboro Musicians Video Transcript
They're two different things, but the first time you do each one it’s really scary. Or it was for me. When we first played a show in high school it was the scariest thing imaginable, and then, after that, it's a lot easier playing in front of people.

But when I got into UNCG and they put me in a large ensemble where a lot of people came and we played, like a theater almost, it was really scary. And then every year it was scary because you take three months off and then you go back to school and you practice different music and you come back and you gotta play a concert. That's more scary, the concert setting. It's scary every time you haven't done it in a while. But it's a lot of fun.

Both are awesome because you're getting to listen to everything around you. Especially in a large ensemble, you can actually pick up on like listening to a brass section or strings. You get a deeper sense of music when you're surrounded by it on a stage. It's really cool.