Tuning Into Baltimore III: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture

On the final day of my internship, I was shown around the multitude of exhibits that are hosted at the MCHC. Of particular interest to me were the exhibits Losing Winter and Flickering Treasures.

Losing Winter is an excellent exhibit, following the progression of winters in Maryland throughout the 20th and 21st centuries through photographs and videos. The exhibit exists to show the impact of climate change on Maryland winters, as well as the memories formed by Marylanders facing heavy snow/ice storms. The contrast between scenes as recently as the 1970s-1980s and today is stark; only as of 2022 has the state seen somewhat consistent snow storms. What struck me most was the sense of community that came through the pictures, as people gathered to help clear snow, or to marvel at the scale of what they were experiencing.

Flicking Treasures intrigued me, as an exploration of Baltimore's movie theaters across the past century. The central theme of the exhibit is demographic change; the scale, opulence and quantity of movie theaters (or halls, in some instances) was dependent upon where people lived. As the middle-class who had spent money to indulge in theater or movies moved out of the city center, larger theater halls were replaced by smaller, more modern theaters that were purpose-built to feature movies, rather than plays. This is all under the assumption that, as was pointed out to me, people weren’t simply using the larger theater halls for their air conditioning (many houses/buildings still lacked it around the 1920s).

Though these exhibits were amazing, my interest was most taken by a map of Baltimore in the early 1800s, along with dioramas of the development of Baltimore. The map is a lithograph that was made in 1869, featuring Baltimore as it was in incredible detail. You can see the existing road networks that have been preserved to today, as well as seeing how small Baltimore was at the time, and how developed it is today.

The Civil Rights History of Baltimore at the MCHC: Part 2

The thing about oral history is that you have the opportunity of learning from different people and hear different perspectives on particular topics and issues of society. Baltimore has a rich history that many don’t know or heard about. The McKeldin-Jackson Project showed and explained the history of segregation during the civil rights movement.

Upon reading and listening to the interviews, I was able to get a better understanding of Theodore McKeldin, the people on his team, and civil rights leaders such as Lily May Jackson and her family. The transcription and translation process of these interviews gave us new perspectives on how African Americans were treated in society and the way Governor McKeldin worked with race leaders to bring change into Baltimore. Not just that but most of the summaries that I was able to create from the interviews were concerns about African American disenfranchisement; education and employment of African Americans; black relations with the police and with Jews; public accommodation of African Americans, black political action, and black women. This opened a doorway for me to learn more about Ford and Lyric theatres in Baltimore; desegregation; restaurant discrimination; the Urban League; Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin's appointments. I think it was truly interesting to see different groups of people come together to fight for a common and rebuild a community that wasn’t getting any respect from society.

I think it was quite inspiring to see a black woman like Lillie May Jackson, working closely with the governor of Maryland to create opportunities and change for the black community. It was amazing to see her support Louise Kerr Hines, who was discriminated against at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as she wasn't offered a position for a free library training course due to the color of her skin. It was quite significant to see Carl Murphy of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper and Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People suing the library for their discriminatory actions towards the black community.

The most important part of the internship was the opportunity to listen to and transcribe old audio from the 90s. It was a long and difficult process but it was worthwhile for any future historian who was trying to get into the field of transcribing works of others from any time period. Overall, though the internship wasn’t too long of an experience, I still found all the projects and work that we did to be quite interesting and such a contribution to my field of study as a future historian.

The Civil Rights History of Baltimore: MCHC Part 1

 

Public History uses historical skills and getting around communities to learn and study history. I learned public history by making history with people who know and understand the field. From my experience doing a public history summer internship with the UMBC history department, I could fill some gaps in history that I didn’t know about history by doing fieldwork and conducting oral history interviews of those who were a part of the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore. The boot camp internship is a history internship, designed as a way for students to practice the work of public historians and the aspect of oral history and why it is essential for us to make history.

The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) is the internship's location; It was founded in March of 1844.it is an excellent place of history and has a lot of documents that historians can use to conduct a research projects, etc. As the museum was in the process of creating a civil rights exhibition, the translation of interviews done about the history of the Civil rights movement in Baltimore was needed as a way for the public and citizens to learn more about the history of Baltimore.

The internship was designed as a way for students to work on interviews that were done in the past, to create short summaries for the public to see if they have an interest in a specific person. It further taught us how to do the transcription and translation of old interviews as a way for the public to have easy access to information. It was the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection that we were working on to create short summaries for the community to have an interest in it. The use of audio recordings to craft a story or a summary can be challenging, and sometimes you might perhaps record information that might not be the truth or not to the extent of what the interviewee said. This internship is an excellent opportunity for history students to practice history and the different ways that historians make history. We tend to associate just being behind a desk with the study of history, but there are many ways that we make history. Fieldwork and the inducting of an oral interview are methods that the internship was teaching us in a sense for us to be great historians in the future.

Corey Fitzpatrick Blog #1: A Contract Job Handling the FDA’s Artifacts

For the last few months, I have worked as a contractor at the History Office at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As stated on its website, the mission of the FDA History Office is to increase knowledge of the history and activities of the FDA and its predecessor, the Bureau of Chemistry of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. In general, the History Office’s activities involve the research of the historical background of the agency’s legislative initiatives, the documentation of oral history interviews and museum objects illustrating the history of the agency, and the promotion of an accurate account within the agency and to the public, while meant to increase an informed understanding of the FDA's purpose and function.

During the summer of 2021, I began volunteering at the FDA History Office, using my video editing background to create the video elements of upcoming historical exhibits at FDA’s White Oak campus. Before my volunteer work, I (as I’m sure as many others) had little understanding of the historical background of the FDA and how many facets of everyday life it regulates. It was only later in the summer that I was approached by two of the agency’s historians, Dr. John Swann, who specializes in the history of drugs, biologics, and their regulation, and Dr. Vanessa Burrows, who specializes in the history of medicine and public health, with a focus on medical consumerism and regulatory policy, and asked if I was interested in a contract job involving the artifact collection of the History Office. 

Since its founding, the FDA History Office has collected artifacts that physically represent the story of the agency's history. These artifacts, which total several thousand individual items, are meant to illustrate the products that the various offices within the FDA regulate. Examples of the kinds of artifacts can be seen on display in the hallways of the White Oak campus. The collection also includes about 4000 reference samples of pharmaceuticals from the 1950s to the 1980s, including products that accompanied new drug applications and reference standards issued for the United States Pharmacopeia.

My job, officially titled Administrative Specialist II, involves the accessioning of over 1500 uncatalogued artifacts. These artifacts were collected or donated throughout the previous decades and range in type of artifact, size of artifact, and overall condition of the artifact, from bulky laboratory equipment from the 1970s to fragile pharmaceutical bottles from the 1920s. My duties involve the direct handling of the artifacts while I research their historical background before labeling the artifacts with a unique numbered code. The FDA History Office had only recently transitioned from inputting the artifacts’ information in spreadsheet form into using the EMu Collections Management System, a program designed to seamlessly store and group all needed information about the artifact in a more organized manner. The transition has run into a few bumps, as later blog posts will show. 

 

For my next post, I will explain the process involved (not to mention some of the difficulties I have encountered) in researching the historical importance, cataloging, and then organization of the artifacts, as well as provide photographs of interesting artifacts worth mentioning.  

Maryland Center for History and Culture Internship Part 2: A Look Into Baltimore Civil Rights

 

A Look Into Baltimore Civil Rights

Maxwell Fore

During my time at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, I had worked with the interviews of many different people who had been a part of the civil rights movement in Baltimore. Each of these interviews gave a detailed look into the experiences and accomplishments of those who had helped fight for civil rights. Each interview provided different perspectives on the issues of 1960s Baltimore, as well as providing insight into how significant people at the time were viewed.

Much of the discussion on public figures in the interviews had focused on the two people the McKeldin-Jackson project had been named after: Theodore McKeldin and Lillie May Jackson. Both of these people were thought of highly by interviewees who discussed their accomplishments and personalities. To many, Theodore McKeldin was a man deserving of respect. Of all the interviews I had listened to, there had been little to no disdain for Theodore McKeldin during his time as mayor. From the interviews it is clear that McKeldin was a man who loved his city and the people in it. A major aspect of his time as mayor was his advocacy for civil rights, being one of few politicians who had truly wished to support the black community and their causes.

Lilie May Jackson had similarly been a highly respected figure in Baltimore civil rights. Jackson was a dedicated civil rights activist who had been truly loved by her community. She had served as the organizer for the Baltimore branch of the NAACP and had been a pioneer in non-violent resistance to racial segregation. She had been a fundamental figure in campaigning against businesses with discriminatory hiring practiices, as well as in the desegrigation of Baltimore city schools. Despite not having wished to become a public leader, Jackson had become a beacon of Baltimore’s civil rights movement. From the interviews it is clear how significant she was towards progress in Baltimore, and how revered she was by those around her.

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections, Part II

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a strange time to pursue a graduate degree. For the past several years, students' ability to travel for research (or any other reason) has been severely limited, due to public health needs and concerns. In addition to impacting my ability to conduct in-person research for my degree, the pandemic of course has had a staggering effect on the world at large, including the global supply chain. Items as commonplace as paper towels, or as complicated as the microchips needed to manufacture almost any modern automobile, have sometimes become scarce or altogether impossible to find. 

My internship with Special Collections has faced this hurdle, too. Part of my work with the Lewis Hine collection will involve rehousing the fragile old photographs in new, safer enclosures. The prints are currently kept in mylar sleeves, ten sleeves per file folder in archive-safe boxes: imagine a highly-specialized sort of baseball card collection, and you've got the right general idea. 

The current enclosures, however, used adhesive to create a pocket in the mylar sleeve for the photograph, and the adhesive has started to break down over time. This sometimes leads to the adhesive wandering out from its original location and "attacking" the photograph, trapping it along a sticky seam. Unfortunately, I have already found several photographs whose rescue from these enclosures will require the specialist experience of a photographs conservator.  

Lewis Hine, School #9 and #12: Some of the boys who work in the glass works at night and go to school in day time, October 1908 (acc. no. P214). The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The image above is one of the "stuck" photographs. If you look carefully along the bottom edge of the print in this old digital copy, particularly above the "Ind." notation in the caption, you can see the mylar sleeve's edges running right up to the print and the second copy of it which is also kept in this sleeve, and the slightly more opaque areas where the adhesive is breaking down with age. Despite gentle efforts, I was unable to free this print today; however, as the copy was not stuck, I was still able to photograph the reverse of each print. The staff and I are hopeful that the new enclosures will help to protect those prints which currently are free and unstuck, and will be safe new homes for stuck prints once a specialist helps to free them safely. 

Because of Covid-19, supplies for this rehousing project took more than four months to arrive to campus from the specialty vendors that Special Collections uses. This is an extraordinary amount of time! It has been extremely rewarding to contribute to the overarching goal of digitizing these photographs and making them more accessible for scholars and interested members of the public. Additionally, I have enjoyed being "behind the scenes" in Special Collections and learning about all of the unexpected, occasionally complicated or fraught, processes involved in digitizing and storing unusual materials. Whether it's something internal like wandering adhesive in archival storage, or something external like a global pandemic's effect on the timeline for receiving orders and supplies, protecting valuable and unique resources like the Hine Collection takes considerable planning, dedication, and special skills. I look forward to continuing my work for the remainder of the semester! 

(As a quick note, I do want to clarify that the existing enclosures for the Hine Collection are generally safe for the prints, and were designed and implemented by professionals with training in caring for and storing photographic materials. Even the best and most groundbreaking storage solutions will deteriorate over time and need to be updated or replaced - this is true for the storage of all art and historic materials. By undertaking this work now, Special Collections is ensuring that the photographs will be safe and protected for a long time into the future.)