A Public History and The Civil Right History of Maryland: Part 3

Upon nearing the end of my internship, I found most of the work from start to finish to be quite influential towards my journey of sparking more within the work of public historians. One of my biggest takeaways from this internship was that it has allowed me to learn about difficult times in Baltimore and why the Civil Rights movement scene is so unique compared to the other states. It shows me that there are many out there with a voice and a story waiting to be heard or who just need the inspiration to do so. Perhaps with the fact that I was able to create summaries of past interviews, there was still a creation of theme within the summary that would let someone know that this can be their story too. Another important thing to note is that the internship helped me understand the connection between history, museums, and communities.

Even so, I was already introduced to public history and have worked with history professors to craft new perspectives about the past. This internship solidified my understanding of public history and sort of brought me into a whole new field that I did not know before as a history major. Though I have done oral history in the past, this internship helped me go deeper by translating and transcribing copies of oral histories that were created by others. When I started studying history, it wasn’t always doing public history work or getting into fieldwork and such, but the MCHC allowed me to see different aspects of history and how we do history. Whether it is critical analysis, or the use of different media to look into the bigger picture.

Though I wasn’t able to attend certain events and exhibitions, I still had a memorable experience at the MCHC. I think that with the COVID-19 pandemic and getting through another year without a spike of cases, I truly understand the reasoning behind working virtual. I think that it would have been better to be there in person to learn more about the different ways that we do history but still appreciate the small moments we had to be able to do certain works. It was an experience that I didn’t imagine to happen but I truly enjoy every little moment at the museums and having to witness the doing of history. It was a momentum to remember. Who could have thought that the MCHC was a place for a public historian or the broader spectrum of history? I am glad to be a part of that movement to reconnect with the past. It was an amazing experience to engage and work with people that share the same passion as me. We are the future when we collectively work together as historians.

Overall, my work with MCHC truly taught me the importance of inclusion and why we must acknowledge certain dark histories of the past. For example, the topic of slavery and racism towards African Americans is not fully taught or explained at its greatest truth and so I think that it is also the job of the public historian to do so. I can’t wait to be that someone who will be teaching others about the marginalization of black, brown, and Native American history. I truly enjoyed this internship and the fact that it has given me the opportunity to work on the McKeldin Project, which opened doorways to learning about Maryland's Civil Rights history.

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.

Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary: Post 2

The newly renovated Greek Revival gymnasium, which now houses 

condominium units, greets visitors when they enter the National 

Park Seminary historic district. Not too long ago, the 

magnificent building was decaying from neglect. (Rebecca Gale)

As I relayed in my last post, I have been completing an internship with the historic preservation nonprofit Save Our Seminary (SOS), based in Forest Glen, which is responsible for the rescue and restoration of the historic National Park Seminary campus. SOS maintains an archive of objects important to the seminary’s history, and I’ve had the chance to aid with organizing parts of the collection to make it more accessible. 

While my first task was filing slides in archivally safe sleeves, my second project was sorting and filing an extensive set of photos depicting the gradual decay and long-awaited restoration of the historic buildings over the course of two decades. The bulk of the photos were taken by my internship supervisor, a historic preservationist and the executive director of SOS, who has been documenting the state of the campus since before most of us undergraduates were even in existence.

The end result of my project: Two and a half feet of binders
filled with hundreds of photos! Each binder houses photos of
a specific building or sculpture, placed in chronological
order to show change over time.

This collection has amounted to hundreds of photos and dates back to 1990. My job has been to sort photos into categories based on what building or object is pictured and place them into archival sleeves in chronological order so that it will be easy to trace the development of each building over time. Going through the photos has been fascinating, and their existence is a testament to the dedication of people who care about the stories that historic spaces tell, even when they no longer showcase their beauty as originally intended. I remember driving past the seminary campus when it was a tangle of weeds; it’s easy to forget the horrific state of the place looking at its pristine, glowing stucco today.

Some of the photos from the collection, depicting one building (a dorm during
the school era) before and during restoration. You can see the historic fireplace
that was preserved throughout the process. (Photos by Bonnie Rosenthal,
courtesy of Save Our Seminary)

This photo collection is a reminder of the victory that has been won in saving one American treasure and restoring it to life. Whenever I set foot on the seminary campus now, I think back to the mind-boggling images of decay – floors falling down, entire walls sagging, stones buckling, roofs caving in, fires being put out – and my heart warms to see a dream realized in front of me, the dream of a group of people committed to a place that spoke to them. The seminary is a reminder to keep fighting for the preservation of historic places because their story deserves to be told and they are meant to be a site of life once again.

• Read my first post on interning with Save Our Seminary.
• Visit Save Our Seminary's website to learn more about the site's history as well as upcoming events, tours, and lectures.

Preserving History: Collections Internship with Save Our Seminary

The seminary built each campus sorority a meeting house 

designed to look like the architecture of different countries. 

The Japanese Pagoda was the Chi Psi Epsilon sorority clubhouse 

at NPS. The exterior was restored by SOS volunteers in 2000. 

(Photo by Rebecca Gale)

This summer, I volunteered with Save Our Seminary, which is a nonprofit organization in Forest Glen, MD that was formed to fight for the preservation and restoration of the historic National Park Seminary campus. National Park Seminary was a women's secondary school that was known for its whimsical architecture. The school was a popular choice for the daughters of prominent Americans until the U.S. Army took over the campus to serve as a medical rehabilitation center for returning soldiers in World War II. By the 1990s, the buildings had fallen into disuse and disrepair.

Shocked by incidents of theft, water damage, dilapidation, and even arson, preservationists and local community members formed Save Our Seminary (SOS) to pressure the army to take better care of the property. After a long, hard-fought battle, they were able to arrange for a developer to restore the historic campus buildings and convert them into condominiums, apartments, and single-family homes. Today, SOS continues their preservation work by archiving the site’s history, providing educational programming, and preserving the site and its sculpture.

Athletics, including horseback riding, were an important part
of academics and student life at the National Park Seminary.
Here students are on horseback in front of the Dutch Windmill,
another sorority clubhouse that is today a restored single-
family home. (Photo Courtesy of the Historic American
Building Survey and Save Our Seminary)

My internship has involved working in the SOS archive to help organize its collections so that they are easily accessible to researchers. My first project was sorting through an extensive collection of slides featuring pictures from the seminary’s extensive history. Some of the photos dated back to the 1890s and it was fascinating to see images of the campus in its glory days, with smiling young women in Gibson Girl shirtwaists with bouffants piled high posing for the camera with friends.

While the work of archiving – housing, dating, categorizing, and sorting into chronological order – can get tedious at times, I always treasure the intriguing glimpses into the past that often serve as a reminder that history was lived by people not so different from us. And even though the tasks we perform as interns can seem insignificant, each small task contributes to a larger cause: preserving the stories of the past to inspire the people of the future. 

For more information on Save Our Seminary and the National Park Seminary, visit the organization's website at http://www.saveourseminary.org/. 

Baltimore Uprising Project

I have had the good fortune to work on the Baltimore Uprising project this summer. The project is a digital archive of photographs and stories from the Baltimore Uprising, www.baltimoreuprising2015.org. The website is built using Omeka, a free platform developed and supported by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Some readers might not be familiar with the Baltimore Uprising, at least as a term. I am linking a thorough explanation of the term here. In brief, after Freddie Gray, a 25 year old Baltimore man, died in police custody, many people took to the streets in protest. They spoke out against systemic racism and police violence. Media coverage monikered the events the Baltimore riot, but on twitter, the hash-tag #baltimoreuprising arose to counter the inappropriate national characterization of events transpiring in the city.

All too often, the history of events can only be accessed through the lens of bureaucracy and official reports. This is problematic to say the least. Michel Rolph-Trouillot spoke to this struggle in his book Silencing the Past.  Trouillot proposed that power, in the form of silence, influences the production of history at multiple stages. Although historians can alter the power dynamics in the historical record through source selection and interpretation, they are usually limited by the kinds of sources that exist. In her article “Seeing Yourself in History”, Michelle Caswell equates a communities absence in the archives as “symbolic annihilation.” With this in mind I am sure, Dr. Denise Meringolo quickly responded to the Baltimore Uprising by creating an Omeka based website where people could upload their own photographs and stories from the Uprising as primary sources for future researchers to access. The site could be a digital repository, recording the grass-root voices of the social movement. The Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) had a similar idea and eagerly made a public call for photographs. They were flooded with submissions, but did not have a prepared infrastructure to handle the submissions. Fortunately, the Historical Society heard about the Baltimore Uprising site and proposed a partnership between Meringolo and the Society. So, like any inspired Public History venture, the project grew.

Next, I was brought on as an intern to process the backlog of photos that MdHS already had and upload them to the website. I was also enlisted to collaborate on developing the website as an archive and a useable resources. So far, the site has over 1,500 items and is still growing. The number of institutional partners has grown and the project is still thriving and expanding nearly 3 months after the most tense moments of the Baltimore Uprising.

Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation” The Public Historian, Vol. 36, No. 4 (November 2014), 26-37.

Interning at the Holocaust Museum

For my internship this summer I will be at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at their collections management branch in Linthicum Maryland. My work has primarily revolved around the condition assessment of pending collections cartons that need an updated condition report on file and then I add them to the data base for quick access if anyone needs to find the location, description, and condition of these specific items in the future. For condition reports I must take the object and give measurements, identification of possible afflictions effecting the objects, and identify the afflictions in a picture of the object. When it comes to the process of adding these pending collections into the data base I use a module database program called EMU and I use a legacy number to identify the collection, if it has been registered in a previous database I update the location, if it has never been added to the database I create a new file for it. I have dealt with several interesting objects while interning, a few things that stand out have been the pictures and documents that are apart of collections that deal with the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, there has also been a number of childrens books that were used as propaganda during the Second World War.  Aside from my primary duties I have helped out a lot with the proper packaging of out going loans from the museum. Recently, last week, the museum had to return a barrack to Poland that consisted of over 1000 items. I help with taking pictures, condition report, and proper placement in shipping boxes, this was an enormous project that I was glad to help with. To better understand the nature of collections management and the context of the objects I am working with I have created a reading list that consists of a textbook about the history and practices of collections management at museums, a collection of articles and oral histories of soldiers who were involved in the liberation of concentration camps, and a study of research on the nature and practices of what happened at these concentration camps so I can better understand what I am looking at. In addition the the Holocaust Museum my supervisor took us on a tour of the Peabody Library and Museum in Baltimore city to understand how their collections management process functions. This internship has been exhilarating and very interesting so far and I can not wait to see what is in store for the rest of the summer.