Blog Post 1: Internship at The Maryland Military Museum

 I have just completed my first month at The Maryland Military Museum. I figured I would wait until I had an actual goal, actual skills and actually learned a few things before I wrote my blog post. The first few weeks went slowly, I spent most of my time putting documents into protective slips, navigating Past Perfect software, and hanging out with the office dog. This internship gave me a refresher on handling fragile artifacts, what gloves to use, hand washing, how to describe the condition of the documents and now my new favorite word is “foxing”. I have never really been too interested in military history, in hindsight that’s silly because war touches so much of history. After looking at lots of documents involving prisoners of war, blowing up windmills and telephone conversations between generals, where men begged for reinforcements and were met with silence, I finally saw the people behind the scenes. 

Originally my goal was to just learn how to use Past Perfect. The Maryland Military museum has a vast and most impressive collection of newspapers, letters, postcards, telephone transcripts and even Nazi paraphernalia. Despite this huge collection, the museum had no digital archive, the system of organization is fairly dated, most record systems in the museum are handwritten. So I had planned to just help in anyway I could to start making the archive a little more accessible to the public. With that goal in mind, I set out to become fast and efficient in Past Perfect. I believe I have already accomplished this task. So I set out for an other objective. An other student is working on creating an exhibit for the museum, I plan to see if it is possible for me to be more involved in that aspect of the museum as well. Although at the moment, I am really enjoying the archival work I do. I really enjoy talking to the people who come in and out of the office, it gives me a lot of good insight to the world of museums and research. I talked to people who wrote books about their passions and veterans who I hope will give an oral history soon. More than anything this internship reminded me why I like history, with Covid I’ve felt so removed from it. This internship makes me actually feel like setting new goals, learning new things and writing about things I care about.