The Red Cross Archives

So what is in the archives of the American Red Cross? Before I begin, just a quick heads up, the American Red Cross has been a disaster relief with the United States since 1882. Therefore, many of what is in the archives comes from some of the less cheerful times in the nation’s history. For example, there is a large section in the archives from the Red Cross’s involvement in World War I and II. Of these include sample kits that the Red Cross gave to American Prisoners of War in camps. Many POWs have thanked the Red Cross, and many have thanked the Red Cross for saving their lives. The Red Cross also has items from other wars such as the Vietnam War, including an RPG that came in through a Red Cross field hospital.  Miraculously, no one was injured in the hospital. In the archives is also items from times when the nation was not at war, by people were still suffering. One such is a sample seed kit that the Red Cross handed out during the dust bowl, where many were struggling to put food in the ground and on their table. Also, the Red Cross has items from natural disasters from the 1881 Michigan Forest fires to the 1905 Galveston, Texas floods that devastated the town. The Red Cross also has items from more recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. The Red Cross also has uniforms from a nurse’s outfit in WW I to what a Red Cross volunteer would wear in Operation Desert Storm. The Red Cross also has something that is also telling, space to put items from where the humanitarian efforts of the Red Cross are needed again. Overall, this post was not propaganda for the Red Cross, (that’s in the archives too). It was that history has a lot of ups and downs. However, in those downs are people and organizations helping people wherever they may be.

Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary - Part 3: Material Culture

Possibly my favorite part of my collections internship with historic preservation nonprofit Save Our Seminary (SOS) was taking inventory of new acquisitions to the organization’s archives. One of SOS’s board members monitors sites like eBay for paraphernalia related to the school. I was surprised that there would be things sold online related to the school, but that speaks to the wide spread of the girls that attended the school. One yearbook I looked at listed girls from a huge variety of states, some even from overseas. It was rare for a student to actually be from the DC area. And like any college, the attendees had a lot of pride in their alma mater; National Park Seminary had an active alumni network even after the school closed in the 1940s.

A 1920s school yearbook. The girls all sport stylish 1920s bobs and each girl
has a fun, congenial description of her personality written by the yearbook staff. 
Another interesting note: The Yearbook was called "The Acorn" and you may be
able to see the squirrels drawn in on the blocks behind the women’s pictures.

Unfortunately, many of these alumna are passing away and their estates are being sold. The majority of the acquisitions I went through were from the collection of one particular woman who attended NPS in the early 1920s. Interestingly enough, my supervisor and I discovered through some archival detective work that this woman and her sister both went to National Park Seminary…and must have married two men who were brothers!

A note from one student to another asking to meet at one of the sorority buildings.

It was amazing how much stuff these women kept: playbills, ticket stubs, notes from friends and faculty, postcards, letters. One thing I found particularly amusing were these short notes that I dubbed “early twentieth-century text messages.” Sometimes these were warning notes from school faculty regarding money owed or dorm rooms that needed to be cleaned. Other times they were notes from sorority sisters asking the girl to meet them at a certain place later that day. It was interesting to see how people communicated before email and text.

A scrapbook featuring playbills and other paper ephemera.

A whimsical name plate pasted into a scrapbook. These name plates with characters
were common and some of the paper decorations in the scrapbooks are quite elaborate.

I also had a chance to look at yearbooks, school catalogs sent out to advertise the college to potential students, and scrapbooks made by students of their time at the school. It was fascinating to see fashions and hairstyles change over the years but also to get a sense of what it was like to be a student at NPS. Since I scrapbooked my own college experience, it was interesting to see the change and continuity between scrapbooks (and college life) in the early twentieth century and today. In fact, I decided to use the scrapbook collection as the source base for my senior thesis. All in all, after spending so much of my internship focusing on the buildings of the school, it was enlightening to get a glimpse on the lives that were lived within those buildings. 

Giving life to buildings: The field hockey team sat in front of the stone arches below

 for this picture. I found this photo interesting because school sports teams still take photos like this one.

 

• Read the first and second posts on this internship.
• For more information on National Park Seminary historic district, visit www.saveourseminary.org.
• Find public history internship opportunities.

The last few weeks of the internship, I continued working on Neatline ( interactive map) that the library has worked on as it pertains to the history of the library. I was able to organize each exhibit and or event that the library has worked on since their inception. Their inception was in 1992, but their first exhibits were made during the 2000s. Camilla had completed all the information, what I needed to do was to organize each singular event into three categories, exhibits, community outreach, and partnership with other organizations.

We also have each one of these categories in different colors, green, blue, and red. Once I completed that, there was one last thing for me to do, and that was post 2 exhibits, one was a photography one and the other was a Holocaust one in the library. The first one I put up was the photography one, which was somewhat challenging due to carefulness that went in it. Each photograph was placed in frame and there were about 26 photographs that needed to be placed on wall in the library. Again I had to be very careful about not dropping it and also not putting my fingertips on the glass frame. The last exhibit, I helped Nickolas put up, I had already finished the internship and I decided to go Nick's office and see what he was doing and I ended up helping him get the Holocaust exhibit ready.


I had not known that once I had completed the 120 hours, that the internship was over, I had hoped to continue for a couple of days in January, since I am taking a Winter course. But it could not be, but I am very grateful to have been able to intern at the library this semester, it was very beneficial. It helped me understand what goes on in a library setting, and the people that I worked with were very helpful and welcoming, finally I would like to thank Dr. Blair who was the one who recommended me, without her none of this would have been possible.

Lessons from Heritage Montgomery and Maryland State Archives

My summer interning for Heritage Montgomery and working with the Maryland State Archives provided valuable insight and experience for me, as I look forward into my career post-graduation. My time at the Maryland State Archives was filled with beneficial networking opportunities and information on navigating careers with a history degree. The MSA’s summer internship program is incredibly helpful because the staff provide departmental presentations every week that address each department’s background and duties. This is helpful when considering which part of a public history institution can most fit a student’s abilities. For example, those inclined with customer service and advanced degrees are apt to become reference librarians or work in the acquisitions department. The staff was also helpful in understanding how specific employees came to their position and what steps in their career led them there. This summer was also incredibly helpful when determining the next steps in my career as well.

Through the endless hours of cataloging and scanning collection material into the MSA database, I came to the conclusion that a career of archiving was not the professional choice for me. The amount of research that can come out of archival work is hugely beneficial and extremely appealing to a history undergraduate, but my experience has shown that I am not an archivist. This was the most enlightening moment that my internship provided because it taught me how to figure out my personal strengths and weaknesses in a professional environment. In addition, the knowledge I gathered from observing other professionals in their career inspired me to take steps toward graduate school.

At the conclusion of my summer with Heritage Montgomery and the Maryland State Archives, I reflected that my internship was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I learned more about myself than I had known previously and I was able to produce a valuable asset to Pleasant View Historic Site’s success as a small community museum. Being a part of this experience has taught me intrinsic life lessons that I will be able to take with me into other careers. Finally, Pleasant View Historic Site holds a special place in the history of Gaithersburg, Montgomery County, Maryland, and my heart.

The 1970s Project

While conducting preliminary research for my Masters thesis, Freedom and Total Loss: Hippies, Migration and the Back-to-the-Land Movement in 1970s Vermont, I came across a project that was currently underway at the Vermont Historical Society (VHS) titled, Freaks, Radicals & Hippies: Counterculture in 1970s Vermont. VHS had been awarded a sizable ($117,500) two-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to conduct a project that would incorporate a large-scale oral history endeavor, survey and cumulative physical and online exhibit. The project aimed to record what the counterculture experience looked like in Vermont in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the lasting influence that it had on the community and culture of the state. I think most Vermonters would agree, whether they are for, against or indifferent to the event, that the surge of progressive urban migrants had substantial impact. The discovery of the VHS project for me felt serendipitous, even validating. Prior to this I had held fears that my thesis topic was too obscure, especially to study outside of the state. I thought, “Even the federal government is doling out funds on a topic that they feel is worthy of research.” The history of this migration, and the way it played out in the social, economic and political atmosphere of the state felt unusual and meaningful, even pointedly current as democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was concurrently gathering popularity in his run for democratic presidential nomination against establishment candidate Hillary Clinton.

            

             When I started my internship with VHS the entirety of research for the project had been conducted. The team was in the process of developing the exhibit (to open September 2016). As a result, I was tasked with a few projects that would contribute towards the online content. The majority of work involved creating audio logs for oral histories. This consisted of consolidating dialog topics from the interview into small paragraphs that represented ten-minute segments. I also created associated keywords that would be plugged into the online catalog search engine. Although creation of these audio logs was a tedious process, hearing these interviews introduced me to names, locations and events that have become tremendously informative to my research. In fact, my internship with VHS became a direct lesson in reciprocity, the ultimate objective of any institutional-intern relationship: A month ago all fifty interviews became available to the public on the VHS website. My work with the audio logs helped to speed that process, which in turn gave me access to an integral source that I plan to draw substantial material from. In fact, as far as I know I am the only researcher to have used the interviews thus far.

            

              As my thesis focuses in part on the tensions between native Vermonters and the counterculture newcomers, I was keen to observe how contemporary Vermonters would digest an exhibit that highlighted hippie history, albeit scars and all. As it turned out the VHS project was not absent from public criticism. The seeds of this criticism may stem from the sharp differences between the two groups. The migrant hippies were a homogenous bunch that did not conform to the socio-economic conditions of residents in the state at the time. While young, they were largely from middle to upper-class families, urban or suburban, and college educated. A survey conducted by VHS found 75 percent of them to have college degrees (Rathke, 2016). They also arrived en masse. For a century, population in Vermont had remained almost stagnant. In the 1960s the population increased by 14 percent and in the 1970s, 15 percent. The VHS team was acutely aware of the tensions that came from this cultural divide and they sought to objectively balance public memory within their research. An article in the newsletter on the upcoming exhibit exemplified their understanding of this, “‘Many people believe that the ’ 70s were a deeply controversial time, and that the influx of new people ruined the state forever.’ Our research has found a deep-seated undercurrent.” (Nelson, 2016) However, the attendees of their story collecting “town hall-style” forums, oral history interviewees and survey respondents were overwhelmingly counter culture identifiers. With a project that sought to tell the story of change, they struggled to reach the state’s constant.          

The conservative news network Watchdog.org published an article soon after the endowment of their 2014 grant that shammed the historical society and federal government for wasting tax dollars. Watchdog, a 501(c)(3), is known for policing federal spending and receives it’s own funds from unnamed sources, though suspects points to right-wing special interest groups. (Peters, 2012) The article essentially truncated the project into a familiar voyeuristic, surface-level discourse of the counter-culture, void of any deeper meaning than nudity or drug-use. Yet, the web article stirred a lively discussion in the comments section. Perhaps most telling was an exchange between contributors “Jones” and “Richard Williams”:

Another, amoung many ,examples of the Liberal/Left nakedly stealing citizens money through taxation, and spending it/wasting it on their favorite causes and agendas..
- Jones

In case you were asleep, Vermont has long been a state that supports all the things you hate. You are welcome to stay away. 

- Richard Williams

References:

Amanda Gustin quoted in Julie Nelson. “Listen to the Voices of Those Who Were There.” History Connections 10, no. 2-3 (2016): 6.

Freaks, Radicals & Hippies: Counterculture in 1970s Vermont, Vermont Historical Society, http://vermonthistory.org/research/vermont-1970s.

Bruce Parker. “Taxpayers stripped of $117,521 for naked hippie commune research.” Vermont Watchdog, October 24, 2014, http://watchdog.org/178853/naked-hippie-research/.  

Justin Peters. “‘Serious Point-of-view Journalism’?.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 13, 2012, http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/serious_point-of-view_journalism.php.

Lisa Rathke. “Project details impact of 1970s counterculture on Vermont.” Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, September 19, 2016.

Giving the tours at the Red Cross Headquarters

One major aspect of interning in the history department at the Red Cross is to give the tours to anyone who schedules an appointment, or those who walk in Wednesday or Friday at 10 and 2. The other intern and I had to learn the whole tour in a matter of weeks. The tour is a half hour long that ranges from the building itself (constructed before World War I by the architects Trowbridge and Livingston, cornerstone laid by Woodrow Wilson, who was president at the time) to a marble bust of Henry Dunant, the Swiss businessman, who during his travels, encountered a battle at Solferino, Italy in 1849, where he gathered the residents of the town to help the wounded, who were just left where they were. Dunant later wrote a book, called a Memory of Solferino. In that book, he called for a reformation on the care for the wounded on the battle field. Thus, the 1869 Geneva Convention, which was where the International Red Cross and the symbol, the inverted Swiss Flag, was established, as well as rules regulating the care for the wounded and prisoners of War. During the tour, we also talk about Clara Barton, where we have several items of hers on display as a part of the tour. These items include the field desk that Barton used during the Civil War (she was an avid writer, even for the time) as well as the sewing kit where she would sew bandages for the wounded. There is also an invitation for the first meeting of the American Red Cross in 1882, to her own personal diary. The items go on, from paintings donated to the American Red Cross by prominent painters such as James Montgomery Flagg, to a set of stained glass windows that are nothing less than breathtaking, to quilts that were signed by elites. 

The Headquarters of the American Red Cross

The Guitars at the Mansion on O Street

The Mansion on O Street is renowned for its strong connection to the music industry.  It’s founder, H. H. Leonards, sits on the Board of Directors for both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriter Hall of Fame, and the hotel is patronized from celebrities from Kenny Loggins to Jackson Browne to Emmylou Harris.  One of the crown jewels of the Mansion is its extensive collection of valuable, historic, autographed, and otherwise notable guitars, which I spent my time at the Mansion researching and cataloguing.  The collection boasts donations from notable figures such as the legendary Les Paul, whose name has become synonymous with rock and roll music, and Bob Dylan, whose signature is adorned on 3 different guitars in the Mansion.  Some notable selections from the collection include: a Fender Stratocaster valued at $75,000, hand painted by artist Ralph Steadman, who is known for his work with Rolling Stone magazine and Hunter S. Thompson; an Alvarez guitar signed by Janis Joplin, which is in a display case that also bears her death certificate and will; a custom, hand-painted Les Paul donated by the man himself; a Fender Telecaster signed by Bruce Springsteen on his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; a Gibson J-45 donated by the then-president of Gibson and signed by Yusuf (formerly Cat Stevens); and a miniature guitar signed by all 5 of the Eagles in 1994 (which is exceptionally rare).  As I began to collect the stories behind these instruments and the people that signed them, I began to realize the extent of the history and reach of the Mansion.  Suddenly I realized that I was working in a location that is beloved by all kinds, from musicians and actors, to senators and U.S. presidents (all of whom have visited since Ronald Reagan), to leaders like Rosa Parks, and to regular tourists visiting the nation’s capital for the very first time.  My time there was a glimpse into a world far beyond my own, and one which I hope to be a part of someday.