Sine Die

Sine Die

           

Welcome back to the third and final installment of the 2017 Legislative Session

This session has been one of the best experiences of my life. I have learned about so many different issues and have seen the passion that people bring to the table on each of these issues. I have learned the significance of strategy and the ways to go about getting legislation passed. For this post, I will show some of the stomping grounds during session and also provide some end of session results.

First, this is an image of the mural that is located in the House of Delegates Building. It is in the “circle” which is the middle area that is between the committees. If you are in this area during session you will see it filled with lobbyists, concerned citizens, delegates, and legislative staff. I must say that this area becomes loud and intense during bill hearings. Some of the staff found this area to be intimidating due to the limited space and loudness. I just channeled my days as a football player and found it a walk in the park. It was much more pleasant than someone trying to hit me on the field.

As you can see, there is a phrase that is in Latin. I took two years of Latin when I attended private school and it was my favorite subject. I had someone walk by and tell me that it meant “Friends and Family.” I knew that was incorrect before they said it as I guessed its translation from my prior knowledge. It actually means “Increase and Multiply.”

Is anybody a baseball fan? Specifically, an orioles fan? Well, yes that is me and yes that is superstar first baseman Chris Davis to my right. The Baltimore Orioles do an annual visit to Annapolis to tour the grounds and meet with state representatives. I was able to attend because I was staff and meet each of the players. Davis is hands down my favorite because I like his style of play. I played first base a lot in my career and also we have similar hitting technique. Plus, I can now say that in person he is just as cool off the field as he is on the field. This was an awesome experience for an avid baseball fan like myself.

This next image best represents our legislation from this session. HB 1325- Hydraulic Fracturing Ban. This was a ban that I could fully support. Maryland is important to me and fracking would tear it apart and ruin wonderful places such as Garrett County and Allegheny County. Here we have the official bill signing in the State House on April 4^th. I am in the far left side of the room. I was able to be in this photo because I was a staff member of the primary sponsor on the bill, my delegate, David Fraser-Hidalgo. I was also able to meet Governor Hogan and receive an official pen from this signing. It was a great experience and ending to such an exciting legislative session. For those who are wondering, my delegate is in silver, standing directly behind Governor Hogan. This bill and now law was one of historical significance. We are the third state to legislate a full ban on fracking. Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo and the office did a wonderful job working to get this legislation passed.

I have posted this picture to represent the feeling of the end of session. It is a crazy looking person on top of an eighteen wheeler. It is meant to demonstrate our mindset through the final portion of session. We knew that we would go crazy and we were driving full force into it. These little stress toys brought some much needed relief to the office at the right times. The crazy looking person says to Relax when you squeeze it. Overall, it was crazy and I felt that this image best depicted the feeling of the end of session.

  

I wanted to conclude with a picture of my desk. This is where I did a good portion of my work during my internship. I did a significant amount of research sitting at this desk. I also spoke with constituents over the phone about their top concerns. This was also the area where I coalated testimony for the daily committee meeting. It was a nice little area that I had to work to help the office. I enjoyed working alongside everyone else in the office and as you can see Kelly and I worked directly next to each other. She was a great person to work alongside as she was always in a good mood. I do want to mention that my chair was broken when I first arrived and it had been broken for a couple years. I fixed that chair on my first day and that set the tone that it was going to be a good year to get things done. We were successful and were able to legislate progress for Maryland.

All in all, I loved my experience working in Annapolis. I can sincerely say that I have found my passion. I intend on continuing to work in the political department of public service. I feel that there are many issues and challenges that need to be addressed. I want to gain experience and learn more tricks of the trade before one day making a run at politics myself. I will say that my momentum will continue as I have accepted a Fellowship/ Internship in Governor Hogan’s office for the summer. I am looking forward to that and to doing my best to make a positive impact by listening to the people. Thank you for reading these posts and following along my journey in the Maryland General Assembly.

Post 1: Jason Aglietti's experiences as an intern at the Maryland State Archives

Last November, I was offered an internship experience at the Maryland State Archives to work under a Research Archivist who is actually a graduate of the Historical Studies program at UMBC. The goal was to work on a special project that the MSA have been involved with since 2013.  The project is called Finding the Maryland 400 and it publishes new research conducted at the MSA on the soldiers who served in the First Maryland Regiment at the Battle of Brooklyn during the American Revolution.  The project is financially sponsored by Maryland Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and they have been heavily invested in this project since its creation.  Over the last few years, the Maryland State Archives have had paid staff members conducting research on the soldiers who fought in the battle and writing blog posts and biographies on these men. I was hired to revamp the way people can access the information to make it more user-accessible and ascetically pleasing for future people who visit the website.

The research has been published through a WordPress website and while it is stuffed with relevant and well-researched information, it was incredibly unintuitive and bloated.  The focus of this website was to present detailed biographies of each men who served in the regiment.  They also have a running blog that updates visitors on interesting stories, useful data, or other bits of information that they uncovered along the way.  However, after nearly four years of being constantly updated with information but no upgrades to its usability, new problems had overtaken the website.

The "biographies"page just became an endless list of names and links that did not provide any reason for visitors to click on them, thus it was a part of the website that was largely ignored by the public. This is unfortunate since this part of the website is the key reason the Maryland Society of the Sons of the American Revolution funded he project in the first place.  The blog, while it received heavy traffic, was very bloated and users had no way to access past content easily.  This is a problem because the website is growing in popularity every year.  It went from 2,400 unique visitors in 2013 to over 9,000 in 2016.  So the archivist in charge of the project new that something needed to be done.

This is where I came in. I have a background in computers (I worked for Apple for almost six years) and the period I’m studying for my Master’s thesis is on the American Revolution — making this position a perfect fit for me.  The goal set out before me was simple: revamp the website and make it easily searchable, more intuitive, and more accessible for readers.

I spent my first few weeks doing a combination of things.  On the research side, I tried to read or partly read every single blog post on the website — which is quite a feat considering how many posts were on there. I also spent considerable time learning about the early continental army. This was important because my studies on the revolution mostly focused on economic, social, and religious aspects to early American society and I spent very little time examining America’s struggling military.  This enabled me to get a firmer grasp on scope of the project heading forward.

Before I made any changes to the website, I created a “test” website that mirrored all the major components of the actual website. I did this so I could experiment with formatting, HTML, and other design components that way myself and the lead historian on the project can decide what we like without making constant changes.

I set up a plan for our future. First we would focus on fixing the aesthetics.  Next, we knew we would handle the usability and search ability of the blog while creating more inviting ways to encourage exploration of the rest of the website.  And finally we knew we wanted to add a stronger educational component for people who might visit the website for academic reasons. What we changed, why we changed it, and how it was received will be found in the next blog post.

Internship at USG's Priddy Library Update

Since the completion of my “Women on the Money” Exhibit, I have primarily been working on two projects. The first being the Rosenwald Exhibit and the other was working on the consistency of Neatline, Omeka, and the Excel spreadsheet backup of that data. As of my last post, I had created a prospective outline on the exhibit on Julius Rosenwald that will be paired with the screening of the Rosenwald documentary by Aviva Kempner.

Julius Rosenwald

 Leah Rufus and I compiled more primary and secondary sources for research on the exhibit and I went through the various sources and pulled what I thought was the pertinent information. Also, a great learning experience that I gained from this was reaching out to other libraries and special collections throughout different states to request information and images that they had on Julius Rosenwald. Surprisingly, quite a few librarians and special collections were more than happy to provide information and resources for the exhibit.  The information I assembled seems like it will be far too extensive to put on posters. Therefore, I began looking for the most important aspects of the information I gathered to make it as concise as possible. From there, I put the information into the outline I created and asked Nickolas and Irene to help me edit it and see how it flowed. As well as creating the exhibit to pair with the screening, I was tasked with creating a list of invitees for the screening. This list included parts of the community that would be interested in a documentary of a Jewish immigrant philanthropist that worked to help promote education for African-American youths in the American South during segregation. The list of groups and people to invite included: local synagogues, local youth groups, local historical African-American churches, and Montgomery College Rockville History, Anthropology, and Social Sciences Department Faculty. Creating this list and drafting an email to send with the screening poster gave me valuable experience in community outreach.

Screenshot of Omeka

However, my progress on the Rosenwald Exhibit had to be put on hold as I began to work on proofing Neatline, Omeka, and the Excel backup.  Working on this was very time consuming as there are over 200 items that I had to go through and make sure that they were identical on all three places. Unfortunately, there were items missing in the Excel spreadsheet backup and I had to go through each exhibit individually to locate the missing items. Once I found those, I had to enter in the metadata and make sure it was consistant in each place. Also, I had to upload a handful of exhibits that were missing from Neatline. Eventually, I completed this process and had to move to editing the titles and text descritions of the exhibits in the Priddy Library History Collection for spelling, grammar, syntax, and overall consistancy. The items in this collection totaled to 95, so it was a little easier than going through all 250+ items stored in Omeka. The Priddy Library History Collection is a set of events, exhibits, and community outreach programs that reach back all the way to the beginning of the Library at this location in 1992 when it was called the Shady Grove Library/Media Center. By editing the collection, I was able to learn about the origins of the Priddy Library and the Universities of Shady Grove Campus. I am currently waiting for Irene to complete the final round of edits on the collection so I can begin to focus more on finishing the Rosenwald Exhibit. I am looking forward to seeing the completed product for both the Neatline and Omeka sites, as well as the Rosenwald Exhibit.

Cribs: State House Edition

Cribs: State House Edition

The 2017 Legislative Session has been a journey so far and I figured that a tour might be in order. I will do my best to give you a sample of the scenery and history that lives here in the heart of Annapolis.

I figured that a good place to start would be the historical marker of the state house. This marker is in the backyard of the state house. I had finished up most of my work for the day and so I decided to go on an adventure. This adventure provided an incredible amount of historical significance that I knew was located here. This marker begins to tell the story of how integral Annapolis was to the establishment of the United States. First, it was the capitol of the country for about one year. I personally thought that was really cool to think that Annapolis was the epicenter of the United States at one point in time.

The 1786 U.S. congress met in the current building as well. I found out that many of them stayed in what is known as the Robert Johnson house. This house is now part of the Historic Inns of Annapolis. I had the opportunity to stay there for two nights during the only bad snowstorm that we had this winter. It has maintained its eighteenth-century architecture and feel and is located literally fifty feet from the Governor’s Mansion and the State House. I felt like I had gone back in time and woke up in one of my history books. I know that not too many people will agree but I am thankful that we had that snowstorm.

Our next stop on the tour is at the bell that was on the USS Maryland. The USS Maryland was stationed at Pearl Harbor from 1921-1946 as you might be able to see on the label at the bottom of the bell. This ship was left significantly damaged due to the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, the ship was repaired and returned to Pearl Harbor shortly after. This is pretty much the closest that I have come to seeing the Attack on Pearl Harbor firsthand. It was a significant event in American History and seeing this bell made me stop and think about the resilience that so many Americans displayed on that day.

We will now proceed to enter the State House and check out a few of the areas that I found intriguing. First up, 

I am aware that the screen is all glared up, but this room was one of the best in terms of providing information. I found myself viewing the room from the public history perspective and from the perspective of a citizen of Maryland. This is the main wall of four, each of which display quotes from Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and multiple other significant figures. This main display focused on George Washington’s time spent in Annapolis around the conclusion of the American Revolution. If you look to the middle right you can see the widely known image of Washington crossing the Delaware River. I will say that they did an impressive job with their exhibits and their public history strategies. They have incorporated interactive exhibits that provide interesting facts about many things that involved Annapolis.

This brings us to my favorite room of the tour, 

Here stands a statue (life size), of George Washington, located in the former Senate Chamber of the State House. Washington was about six foot one or two for those that were wondering. The room has been renovated into a “tour room” which displays enough of the room to give an idea of the chamber’s setup back in the eighteenth-century. This statue represents George Washington giving his resignation to Congress on December 23, 1783. Washington wanted to show the people of the country that the United States would be established in the right way. The right way meant that the military general would not assume rule of the country as many others had done in Britain and France for example. He addressed a full room and it was said that there were tears in every eye of the room as he gave his speech. Even Washington began to get emotional as he resigned as Commander-in Chief of the Continental Army. 

I challenge you to do what I did when I entered this room. Imagine that it is December 23^rd, 1783 and you are watching Washington give his resignation address. What do you see? What is the feeling in the room? Do you think he is doing the right thing? You are a member of this new country and Washington, your leader, is going against all traditions that you have been raised to know. Are you inspired and what is your outlook on the future?

I would like to conclude our tour in the State House by staying in the same room, but from a different perspective. 

This is a statue of Mary Ridout in the former senate chamber. She was present at Washington’s resignation address in 1783. She watched from the balcony because women were not allowed on the floor of the chamber. Women were only allowed to view from the upper balcony. I thought that it was of the utmost importance to take note of this. I asked multiple questions about what it was like to be there for Washington’s address and what it felt like. I would imagine that for Mary Ridout it was a much different feeling than any of the congressmen on the floor. Why were women not allowed to participate, why were they only allowed to be spectators? This room is my favorite because of all of the historical significance that it contains. It has the main founding father of the United States memorialized as a statue and he is delivering one of the most significant speeches of his life. It also displays a woman that is relegated to the balcony and is only allowed to spectate, why?

I would like to thank you for taking to time to go along on this tour of the State House. We were able to cover a sample of what the State House holds in store for those that visit. I hope that this sample inspires you to get the full course and check out the place on your own. I wanted to make sure that I did not just work here, but that I learned the history behind Annapolis and the historical foundation that we build upon with each passing day. Session is in the homestretch now and I am excited to report the good news, hopefully, once everything is all said and done.

Take Care and see you on Sine Die!