Maryland Center for History and Culture Internship Part 1: An Introduction to the MCHC

 

https://www.mdhistory.org/about/

An Introduction to the MCHC

Maxwell Fore 

 

Over the winter I participated in a short internship "boot camp" over the period of about a month at the Maryland center for History and Culture. The MCHC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of materials which reflect the history and heritage of Maryland. It contains both a museum and a library which are open to the public for free use. The MCHC houses hundreds of thousands of objects within its museum, and in its library a collection of 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs. Located in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, the organization itself serves as apart of Maryland's history and culture as one of the oldest cultural institutions in Maryland, having been founded in 1844.

At the time of writing, the MCHC has nine exhibitions housed in its museum. Of those nine there were a few that were particularly notable to me: Flickering Treasures, an exhibit which explores the history of movie theaters within Maryland and the culture surrounding them; Intimate Expressions, which contains highlights from the diaries of several Maryland residents from between the 18th-20th centuries in order to document the personal experiences of Marylanders from the past; and finally the Unfinished Revolution, which ties together the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Quasi-War, and the War of 1812, and connects how these conflicts affected Maryland.

During my time as an intern I assisted through transcribing and writing descriptions for the oral history interviews of several people involved with the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The interviews are a part of the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection containing interviews recorded from between 1969-1977. The interviews were incredibly fascinating and without a doubt extremely important pieces of Maryland and Baltimore history. Assisting in a project dealing with such invaluable pieces of history was very enjoyable and fulfilling, despite the short time I had.