On Legacy x Le Studio

What does it mean to preserve a life, or a history?

In this episode of On Legacy, Sophie sits down with historian Abby Smith Rumsey, who spent decades at the Library of Congress studying how societies decide what gets remembered and what gets erased. They explore memory as a moral choice rather than a technical one, why digital archives are more fragile than a scrap of parchment, and why more people today can describe the Black Death than the 1918 flu that killed over 100 million people.

A conversation about memory, archives, and what we owe the future.

Show Notes:

Abby’s website - https://rumseywrites.com/

Abby’s page at Stanford with some of her works - https://casbs.stanford.edu/people/abby-smith-rumsey

David Rumsey's website (Abby's husband) - ⁠https://www.davidrumsey.com/⁠

Intro episode!

“Legacy” is a word often used but never quite well defined.

It stretches from inheritance and estates to memory, identity, art, philanthropy, reputation, and the simple human wish to matter after we are gone.

Join Karine Sarkissian and Sophie Durey as we come to understand why legacy matters and what we hope to learn through this podcast.