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.

Interning at the Maryland Museum of Military History

 

For the past year, I have been interning at the Maryland Museum of Military History located at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore, Maryland. Before I became a paid intern and a graduate at UMBC, I volunteered at this facility during my undergrad at Stevenson University. You could say that I am very familiar with the museum and the historic objects and documents that our archive houses.

As a small museum with around 5 workers, my job as an intern includes completing numerous tasks that not only record the significance of historic objects but also safely store them according to proper archival techniques. In order to accomplish these tasks, I have taken numerous trips to other armories like the Pikesville Armory, which we collected historic objects from to track the history of the 110th Field Artillery Battalion, and the Carlisle Barracks where my coworkers and I learned about new archival and conservation techniques and services. I was even assigned to attend the 2023 Small Museums Association (SMA) Conference in Wilmington, Delaware. This trip has allowed me to build a better social network for both myself and the museum and has provided me with the opportunity to collect numerous resources that our facility can use. In fact, my boss is currently using one of those resources to help create a digital and interactive exhibit that will expand upon the history of the Maryland National Guard’s involvement in various riots and uprisings.

Despite what I have described, traveling to other armories and museums is only a small part of the job, most of the time I am at the museum cataloging documents and objects in our collection on to PastPerfect, a museum software that specializes in collections archiving. In order to fully catalog a historic object such as my most recent object, a World War II helmet, I first researched the specific type of helmet that it is. To do this, I use various reference books that focus on military uniforms and research for similarly designed helmets online. This resulted in the discovery that it was an M1 Helmet from World War II. From there, I incorporated that information into the PastPerfect database as well as including all information related to the history of its design and its significance in the war. Once that was completed, I measured the item, documented its location within the facility, and wrote a detailed description of the helmet’s condition to determine whether it may need future maintenance. Then, I created a list of subjects, a list that is used for recording general subject matter, search terms, a detailed list of terms or words that will be helpful in researching the helmet on the catalog database, and people, the list that is used to identify people associated with the item. For the M1 helmet, I had one individual, Frank Shroeder, who was related to the helmet after his name was discovered on the inside of the helmet. This means I had to take one more step to fully complete the process of cataloging the helmet. I had to create a biography for Shroeder which required me to research his name on various sites like ancestry.com and investigate his involvement in World War II. After finishing the last step to fully cataloging the helmet, I restarted the whole process for other items such as a Bronze Star and a World War I service hat. Although the cataloging process may seem tedious and repetitive, it continues to be one of my favorite tasks within my internship because it allows me the opportunity to interact with various historic objects and helps me expand my knowledge on my favorite field of history, military history.    

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.

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.

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.

Internship at the Baltimore Museum of Industry Blog Post #1

 

This semester, spring 2021, I will be interning at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Currently, I am unfamiliar with local history and although I have lived near Baltimore for most of my life, I know very little about the city. I am excited to learn more about Baltimore's past and I am particularly excited to learn more about the industrial history of Baltimore. For my internship, I will be creating a virtual walking tour of Harbor East consisting of ten sites. The BMI has granted me access to their database and currently I have a large excel spreadsheet which lists all of the companies featured at the BMI to sift through. My supervisor has also input all of the BMI data into a map so that I can see roughly where certain companies were/are located. My task is to choose ten sites for the tour, research each of the sites, and then report my findings in a way that gets the attention of community members. I have been thinking about how to create an interesting tour and will be basing my tour design off of my experience in giving tours for UMBC's Office of Undergraduate Admissions. In addition to providing in-depth research on each of the ten sites, I have to carefully select which information I feel is most vital to the understanding of the history of each site. The tour I create has to be a reasonable length so that community members can actually walk the tour. After the tour is completed, the BMI plans to post the tour on the Baltimore Heritage website. If I finish constructing the tour and still have hours remaining, the BMI is willing to let me perform inventory on one of their exhibits. My personal goal for this internship is to learn how to convey history in a way that interests society. I feel that much historical scholarship fails to capture the interest of the public and I would like to get more people interested in learning about their local 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/. 

How My Internship Began with Howard County Conservancy

        On a brisk, overcast November day, 64 fourth grade students arrived at Howard County’s Belmont Manor and Historic Park for the first “Rock Hunters” field trip of the season. Filled with excitement and an eagerness to learn the kids were already brimming with questions about what they would experience. This day was months in the making. In September, I began an internship with the Howard County Conservancy to help enhance the “Rock Hunters” lesson, and now we were running it for the first time.

Carriage House at Belmont Manor and Historic Park

            For those that do not know, the Howard County Conservancy is a local, non-profit environmental education center and land trust. Dedicated to educating youth and adults about environmental stewardship and ecosystems, the Conservancy focuses its programs on local animal and plant life found in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Conservancy has been educating Howard County youth since 1997, and has been an Educational Partner with the Howard County Public School System since 2003.

The Conservancy provides environmental education programs at two locations, one at Mt. Pleasant Farm in Woodstock and the other at Howard County’s Belmont Manor and Historic Park in Elkridge. The second, location at Howard County’s Belmont Manor and Historic Park, is a newly acquired location. Howard County Government purchased Belmont Manor and Historic Park to ensure the stewardship of the beautiful 68 acres, intact with a historic 1738 Manor House, formal gardens, barn and smokehouse. As a new site, the Howard County Conservancy is looking to expand their opportunities at the Belmont Manor and Historic Park. The location holds deep ties to local history and the surrounding community and The Conservancy would like to include these ties in their program offerings.

To give the idea of Iron Smelting.
"Casting pig Iron, Iroquois smelter, Chicago."

As part of my internship, I help tell the story of the Industrial Revolution in Patapsco River Valley, the Dorsey family role in the growth and the lasting environmental impact. Currently, The Conservancy discusses the use of Iron Works through Industrial Revolution in Patapsco River Valley and its relation to storm water run-off, including a professional display board with mineral manipulatives for Charcoal, Limestone, Iron Ore, Slag, and Pig Iron. However, they wish to deepen this connection and expand the history and social studies connections to reach more Howard County Students and visitors.

            

          Over the months since I have started this project, it has taken many different directions and approaches. In the end, we settled on designing the “rock hunters” as the first priority. Working closely with their Education Manager and doing external research, I worked with the curriculum and materials to include ties to the location’s iron forging history and how it relates to erosion and rain runoff. As I began to research the site’s history, and the originals Manor owner’s connection to iron milling, I found myself overcome with information. There is contradictory information in some sources, as well as local lore that I cannot find documentation to substantiate. Even with all of this, the real struggle is how to relate the information in a 2-hour lesson for elementary aged students.
             

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.