In Preparation for the Big Move

 

In Preparation for the Big Move

A helmet that I previously 

            As I have stated in my previous post, I am currently interning at the Maryland Museum of Military History at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore, Maryland. I have been interning at this facility for almost a year and have yet to be left with a large project to complete as most of my job includes accomplishing smaller tasks such as cataloguing. However, for the past few months I, along with my coworkers, have been working towards helping the museum accomplish its largest project ever, moving. 

To allow you to understand the large project my coworkers and I are in the process of completing I must first explain the layout of the museum and some problems that we experience in our workplace. To begin, our facility is a three-story building and includes a basement. Our museum and archives are on the first floor in a small room that barely fits all the objects and documents that we have and have not cataloged. In fact, some of the objects and documents are stored in various closets around the building where they are not receiving the treatment they deserve. These conditions have caused my boss, Barbara Taylor, to search for new rooms within the facility so our archives can flourish. A couple of months ago, we found those rooms in the basement, in what are currently known as Classrooms 2 and 4. These two spaces are much larger than our current room, can accommodate our increasing workforce, and will allow room for our new archival storage units.

One of the most important tasks that will support our move is acquiring proper shelving, cabinets, mobile storage cabinets, storage racks, and other items that are needed to help our museum. My boss and I have accomplished this by obtaining archival storage items from Fort Meade, an army base whose archives are no longer in use. After visiting Fort Meade numerous times, we have not only gained the approval of Fort Meade’s previous archives directors but collected a couple of new historical items like panoramas of various troops from the 29th Division. Yes, I did have to catalog those right when got back from those trips. While I did have to store those photos and items in storage closets and tight spaces within the archives, I am relieved by the thought that our facility will soon be upgraded with professional archival storage cabinets. I understand that it may seem like I am fawning over a couple of cabinets, but I cannot emphasize the importance of this agreement and these new archival cabinets. These units provide more space for us workers by consolidating the number of objects on a shelf and creating an area where we can safely store the history of the National Guard. Not only that, but it will allow us to better track the location of each historical object and incorporate that into PastPerfect.

We may have completed other tasks that better prepared us for this move such as painting the classrooms, acquiring proper safety regulations and air conditioning, and obtaining new flooring. Our largest accomplishment for this moves so far is the transfer agreement that helps set our museum on the right path to professionally and safely store our collection.

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

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

By: Wyatt Lindsey

From the politically established to the average Baltimorean, the people behind the oral histories I listened to came from a variety of backgrounds. This provided me with a multifaceted perspective of Baltimore in the 1960s, with three main categories of conversation: politics, race/racial tensions, and development of Baltimore.

Discussion of Baltimore’s politics centered around the second mayoral term of Theodore McKeldin from 1963-1967, as well as the immediate effects of his term. From listening to McKeldin’s son, staff members, and advisors, an image of McKeldin as an honest man who got into politics to be among people. Many who knew McKeldin saw him as a rock, holding together Baltimore through his affable demeanor and through his image as someone who listened to whoever entered his office door. Behind closed doors, he was a big-picture thinker who often yearned to spend more time with his family, with a rage that occasionally got the best of him, causing him to act out. It was rare to hear anyone speak ill of McKeldin, and any criticism was often followed by numerous statements of how great of a person and leader he was, leading one to believe that his reciprocated love for Baltimore was genuine.

One of McKeldin’s proudest accomplishments was the development of Baltimore’s inner harbor. The establishment of the Charles Center saw the area rejuvenated under his successor, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III. The inner harbor remained an area that McKeldin was involved with until his death in 1974.

Listening to political actors of the time gives a large-scale view of the changes that were occuring in Baltimore, but a more intimate perspective lay in the oral histories of everyday people. Stories about racial tensions from those who witnessed the era of the Baltimore and Cambridge Riots, including efforts at police reform and the struggle of experiencing integration in public schools. Hearing from many members of the NAACP was also fascinating, especially concerning their retrospective views on the rise of black militancy in the civil rights movement. Throughout all, Lillie Mae Jackson remained a powerful influence, being brought up repeatedly by anyone who talked at any length about the NAACP or its efforts. The admiration demonstrated by those interviewed, even if they had once faced pressure from Jackson in the past, was indicative of her influence in the Baltimore community, especially in regards to race or religion.

Tuning into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture I

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

By: Wyatt Lindsey

Though I was a history student attending college next door to Baltimore for nearly three years, I hadn’t taken an opportunity to dig deep into an area of Baltimore’s history. I got a chance to do so when I received an email from Professor Meringolo, offering me an opportunity to join a public history “boot camp'' in the form of an internship with the Maryland Center for History and Culture. There, I worked with the Collections department to digitize oral histories for the McKeldin-Jackson project, examining Baltimore politics and the civil rights movement during the 1960’s. My work included summarizing and transcribing oral histories.

The project is centered around Governor Theodore McKeldin and civil rights activist Lillie May Carroll Jackson: their work in Baltimore, their contributions to the civil rights movement, as well as firsthand accounts of how McKeldin and Jackson were as individuals. The project also touches on many other influential leaders of civil rights in Baltimore, such as Furman Templeton. Interview subjects included members of the Jackson-Mitchell family, members of McKeldin’s staff during his mayoral term, as well as citizens of Baltimore who lived through the era. Issues of the time are brought up, including the rise of militancy in the civil rights movement, as well as the passing of an omnibus Maryland Civil Rights bill in 1963.

COVID-19 inevitably left an impact on my internship, reducing my time onsite to one day a week. This did not create any significant issues however; the recordings of the interviews were hosted online, allowing myself and other interns to summarize and transcribe from home. To be frank, the weather created more issues over the course of the internship than COVID did; a delayed opening one day, as well as being snowed in on what was going to be the first day.

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.

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.

Documents, objects, and sites: Considering a moving public history career

Over the past few weeks I’ve been contemplating a question for aspiring public historians: How would you best understand—and feel connected to—a historical figure? For example, you’ve no doubt read extensively about Honest Abe in history books and other popular literature over the years. To more deeply appreciate Lincoln as an individual, however, would you rather see his penmanship on original documents, stand before his famous top hat, or visit the place where he lived as a child? Which would move you the most? Now, beyond your personal preference as a visitor, consider your role in helping the public discover the Lincoln. If you would like to create a moment of inspiration for the public to truly understand him, what tools would you use: documents, artifacts, or sites?

From left to right: Lincoln's boyhood home at Knob Creek, Kentucky, now part of the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park; his July 22, 1862 draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, now held as part of the Robert Todd Lincoln Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; the top hat he wore to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, which has been part of the Smithsonian Institution's collections since 1867.

The relative power of these three main mediums of public history seems to be truly personal. Of course, there are many factors that influence how you perceive each encounter, including how clearly the information is presented (whether in person or on paper). Your background, interests, and prior knowledge certainly shape your experience with each as well. As Freeman Tilden reminds us in his classic text Interpreting Our Heritage, visitors respond differently to content and thus interpretation should be customized based on their interests.

It took me 3.5 years of professional experience, a year of graduate school, and a month and a half of interning at the Smithsonian to realize that public historians also have inherently different interests. This is probably a strikingly obvious observation to many, but it’s a new concept for me to articulate. As a consumer of history—someone who loves soaking up history in any form on weekends—I consider museums, historic sites, and archives equally interesting. I certainly believe these three types of history institutions are equally important. However, as an emerging public history professional, it has occurred to me that I do not find documents, artifacts, and sites equally engaging to work with.

Personally, papers do not speak to me in the way objects do. Although Michael Johnson (based on his Denmark Vesey findings published in the William & Mary Quarterly) would likely disagree, I feel that digital facsimiles can sometimes reveal even more than original documents can with the ability to zoom, search, and hyperlink with other rich content. I find sharing a space with original objects that were held, owned, worn, or used by historical actors to be extremely poignant. Objects, however, do not cast the same sense of awe that I feel when visiting a historic building or site. While objects and papers can feasibly be transported, historic sites simply cannot. Instead, they serve as vehicles to transport visitors from the present to the past.

I have long been enamored with visiting battlefields and historic house museums. It recently dawned on me that my attraction stems from the simply matchless power of place. Standing on the very same floorboards as a historic figure almost literally allows you to walk in their shoes. These sites offer an opportunity to become part of where history happened. Historic sites touch all the senses, and they can be deeply affective regardless of age, ability, or language.

Of course, questions of authenticity complicate historic sites. What about buildings that are reconstructed to appear historic or have been significantly modified to come up to code? Structures that have been removed from their original context? Settings that have changed so significantly they would be unrecognizable to the historical actors? Teresa Moyer and Paul Shackel raise all of these questions in their book, The Making of Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park. Although these issues can complicate the interpretation or presentation, I don’t believe they take away from the power of a historic site. The story of a building or site’s preservation can be incorporated into the interpretation to form an engaging and unique narrative. 

Again, these insights are likely obvious to others—but they only clicked with me once I had hands-on experience in each of these main practices of public history. I fully intend to visit archives and museums wearing my “history consumer” (or, graduate student) hat. Moving forward in my career path, however, I will be aware of why my interests lie with historic sites and will seek opportunities that allow me to share my passion for place with the public.

An Overview of My Internship at CECOM

Image 1: Lab Test of cargo courier used by the Signal Corps Antarctic Research Team (1956-57).

     This summer I am an intern with the CECOM Historical Office of the United States Army (http://www.cecom.army.mil/historian/) at Aberdeen Proving Ground. CECOM is the U.S. Army Communications and Electronics Command, which is tasked with the development, testing, and sustainment of C4ISR systems (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) throughout the Department of Defense. CECOM traces its history to the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was originally headquartered at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, but was moved to Aberdeen Proving Ground under the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). During World War I, the need for a dedicated Signal Laboratories led to the development of Fort Monmouth on the site of a former horse racing track.

     In addition to the laboratories and training school constructed on the site, other facilities were constructed on Fort Monmouth (then known as Camp Alfred Vail) to consolidate the operations of the Army Electrical Development Division to develop and test radio equipment and establish a pigeon breeding and training facility. In 1919, all Signal Corps Schools were relocated to Fort Monmouth, ensuring that the facility would survive the demobilization of the Army following the end of the war. Many of the technologies that would be used by the U.S. during World War II were developed by the Signal Corps Laboratories in the years between the wars. These developments included improved radio equipment such as the “walkie talkies” and field telephones used throughout World War II. Most importantly, the Signal Corps Laboratories worked significantly on the development of RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) after the project was transferred from the Ordnance Corps in 1930. The project was top secret, and so in early Field Manuals, RADAR was defined as a term used for communications radio sets.

     During World War II, the Signal Corps played an important role in the U.S. war effort, both in the United States and on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. The Signal School trained men for communications roles throughout the Army and the Signal Laboratories continued to develop new technologies for the war effort, including the first synthetically-produced large quartz crystals, a development which eliminated the U.S.’s reliance on imported quartz for use in communications devices. Following the end of the war, the Signal Corps continued to make important discoveries and innovations, such as Project DIANA, a radar antenna constructed at Fort Monmouth that was capable of transmitting and receiving signals bounced off of the moon. This development paved the way for future developments in artificial satellites such as the first communications satellite, Project SCORE. It was launched in December of 1958 and broadcasted a Christmas message from President Eisenhower back to Earth.

Image 2: Sphere Spotter antenna of DIANA moon radar in 1957.

      The Signal Corps as an institution continued to change in the years following World War II, adapting to the challenges faced in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the overall challenges faced during the Cold War. Reorganization in the military led to new responsibilities and new names for the Signal Corps Laboratories, including ECOM (Electronics Command-1962), CERCOM (Communications-Electronics Readiness Command-1978), and, in 1981, it became CECOM following its merger with CORADCOM (Communications Research and Development Command).

     As an intern at the CECOM Historical Office, I will be working with the digitalization and indexing of a collection of photographs from the Communications-Electronics Museum Collection. These images span the history of the Command, but are primarily from World War I through the 1990s. The collection covers many different subjects, from images of personnel, commanding officers, and buildings at Fort Monmouth to equipment in the lab and in the field. Although I am primarily working with photographic prints, I am also learning about the identification and preservation of photographic negatives. As I continue with my work at APG, I will also learn more about how the Army, and the federal government in general, work with and preserve historical artifacts. I am interested in seeing how the Army’s policies regarding history differ from the policies of the National Park Service, where I had previously held an internship.

Image 3: Mule with radio pack, c1912. (Rear View)

Bibliography:

CECOM LCMC Historical Office, A Concise History of Fort Monmouth, NJ and the U.S.

Army CECOM Life Cycle Management Command (U.S. Army CECOM Life Cycle Management Command, 2009).

Image 1: Image #2605, “US Army Photo collection, C-E Museum Acquisition” from the

CECOM Historical Office archive, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD.

Image 2: Image #2681, “US Army Photo collection, C-E Museum Acquisition” from the

CECOM Historical Office archive, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD.

Image 3: Image #2076, “US Army Photo collection, C-E Museum Acquisition” from the

CECOM Historical Office archive, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD.