Preserving African American Church Collections

This summer, I interned with Heritage Montgomery, a non-profit organization that serves to promote tourism and heritage culture in Montgomery County, Maryland. This past spring, Heritage Montgomery undertook a project designed to preserve and archive the records, documents, and photographs of African American communities located in Montgomery County. Two communities were chosen for this grant, Pleasant View Historic Site and St. Paul Community Church. These communities were identified and chosen based on their immediate need to stabilize their records, documents, and photographs that were damaged or close to being lost from age and deterioration. Heritage Montgomery collaborated with these two communities and the Maryland State Archives (MSA) to complete this project.

My internship played out in two different stages. The first stage consisted of working with Heritage Montgomery in Germantown, MD to develop a collections intake form and conduct a collections intake session for Pleasant View Historic Site. At this intake session, my duties involved maintaining the organization and documentation of the extensive collection so that it would be well prepared for its transportation to MSA in Annapolis, MD. Once MSA staff assessed Pleasant View’s collection, it was transported to Annapolis ready to be archived and digitized into the MSA database.

The second stage of my internship included the responsibility to archive and digitize Pleasant View’s collection with the help of MSA staff. Because of Pleasant View’s large and extensive collection, it took June, July and August at the Maryland State Archives under the supervision of the Special Collections, Imaging, and Legacy of Slavery Departments to successfully complete this project. My duties included cataloging each individual item into the Archives internal database using basic HTML and then scanning each individual item into the imaging database. This allows for public access to view each cataloged entry alongside each digitized item.

Once Pleasant View’s collection was completely archived and digitized, the materials were transported back to Fairhaven Methodist Church that is serving as an intermittent storage facility. Ongoing measures are being taken to begin St. Paul Community Church’s collection this fall.

Pleasant View’s collection is accessible on the Maryland State Archives website in their Special Collections database under collection number 6158. Please check out my archival work from this summer!

First Blog Post about the Priddy Library

Hello, my name is Saul Espinal-Acosta and I am interning at the Universities at Shady Grove Priddy Library. I have been interning there since late August. My supervisors/bosses are Nickolas Faulk and Irene Munster. My duties and responsibilities there are to work on and help design exhibits. At first it felt overwhelming due to the exhibits being made online and having to condense it and being unbiased when writing information.  But since being there for over a month I've grown accustom to that fairly quickly. So far I've worked on editing past exhibits, and I've only really worked on one brand new exhibit so far and that was the Civil Rights timeline exhibit that went up on Wednesday. One of the most challenging things that I had to do for this particular exhibit was to look for photos online that were in the public domain. That may sound easy and all but in reality it's more challenging than it sounds and very time consuming. The other duty that I have which perhaps may be the most important in terms of skills for the future is that of learning how a library functions, the ins and outs. In this very competitive world, a skill in the functions of a library could be very influential when submitting a resume because that show the employer that the employee has a diverse set of skills under their belt.  Next week I will probably know what my next assignment will be. So far, interning at the library has been very helpful and advantageous for me. I have class everyday and doing the internship allows me to be in school for a longer period of time as oppose to just coming to class and leaving an hour and half later. I also get a lot of my work done in the library now, something that before this internship I did not do.

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/. 

History, Collections, and Objects

For a long time, I have been interested in the interplay between objects and the multiple meanings assigned to them, whether by individual collectors, museums, and the public. In the introduction to Interpreting Objects and Collections, Susan Pearce reminds us of our general understanding that museums exist to hold objects from the past, that they have a specific role to play in helping “us”—the visitor, the society at large—understand our past.[1] For the typical visitor to a museum, this working understanding of museums tends to assume that the collection of objects simply happens, yet there is indeed a method to the madness, as it were: “Notions of what creates value are very complex and so are the related processes of social change and the relationship of the material world to these movements.”[2]

Gaynor Kavanagh asserts in History Curatorship that the history museum’s aim is "to encapsulate the physical and oral evidence of being and behaving".[3] As such, those working in these spaces must also be mindful of the social language communicated to visitors—that the objects placed on display provide visitors with cultural frameworks which articulate the norms and values of a group, culture, or nation.[4] As the National Museum of American History (NMAH) opened its doors in 1964, I became intrigued by the idea that the museum’s history might have impacted its methods of collecting, and in turn, the objects placed on display. This wondering led me to conduct some brief research to uncover a fuller story of the museum’s past.

What we now know as NMAH was originally the Museum of History and Technology (MHT). It was the brainchild of Frank Taylor, who began his work at the Smithsonian in 1922.[5] Originally conceived as a museum of engineering and industry, a history department was added to gain the support of political history curators.[6] The idea gained new life in the years following WWII; Leonard Carmichael, then Secretary of the Smithsonian, remarked that it was “incredible that United States, which has given such substantial aid to cultural activities in other countries, does not have equally great national museums."[7]

In January 1954, Representative George Dondero of Michigan introduced a bill to prepare plans for a new museum as "…part of President Eisenhower's plan for a stand-by program of public works to bolster the nation's economy".[8] Taylor, who would become the museum’s first director, promoted it as a “permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom and highlights the basic elements of our way of life.”[9] Such patriotic rhetoric was common in Cold War America. By mid-1955, Congress threw its support behind the museum, asserting a “need to protect our irreplaceable national treasures,” even going so far as to grant Eisenhower’s supplemental appropriations request.[10]

In what ways might have MHT’s Cold War foundations impacted its collections? From what I can tell, there might not have been any impact in the beginning. While the acquisition of the No. 1401 locomotive that pulled FDR’s funeral car from Warm Springs to DC was important, having a new museum would ease the Smithsonian’s space issues, allowing for the display of up to 800,000 objects in the institution’s collection.[11] When the museum opened, the objects on display—from the Star Spangled Banner and Jefferson’s desk, to lemon squeezers, locks, and dolls—were described as the nation’s “strange assortment of items in its attic storerooms over the passing generations"[12] In terms of social language, the objects seemed to communicate “our national character--or love of gadgetry, our skill at applied science, and our quest to make life both interesting and less arduous through invention."[13] But is that the same as communicating America’s history? By 1980, the answer to that question was no.

It was in 1980 that Roger Kennedy, the museum’s sixth director, was faced with declining visitor numbers, no doubt due to the opening of the new National Museum of Air and Space and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. As a result, he led a review of the museum's "exhibition policy, its underlying philosophy, and methods of implementation" focused on "new clarity of purpose, greater unity and interrelation between the many isolated displays and collections.”[14] This search for new clarity led to changing the name of MHT to the National Museum of American History, placing technology in the service of history, not the other way around.[15]

Fast forward thirty-five years, and it would seem that this is still the case. I was not able to ascertain exactly if the process of collection has changed over time; as I write this reflection, it is clear that I should have attempted to obtain and review historical curators’ reports. However, what is clear is that NMAH continues to use its objects to place American technological innovation into historical context. For example, the Object Project exhibition “examines how the interplay of people, innovative things, and social change have shaped life as we know it.”[16]One day on a walkthrough of the exhibition, I participated in a demonstration of the evolution of ice and cold drinks. I was able to explore a variety of ice cube trays and discuss with fellow interns how the cold drinks we now enjoy (and given the extreme heat this past summer, also required) did not always exist. Our lives, made less arduous by invention.

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[1] Susan M. Pearce, "Introduction." In Interpreting Objects and Collections, edited by Susan M. Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.

[2] Pearce, 4.

[3] Gaynor Kavanagh, “"Objects as Evidence." In History Curatorship. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 109.

[4] Kavanagh, 107-108.

[5] Albert H. Small Documents Gallery, National Museum of American History, “Making a Modern Museum,” http://americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/50th/7.html; Michael Kernan, “Light in the Attic: Remaking the Museum of American History,” The Washington Post, July 20 1982.

[6] “Making a Modern Museum”.

[7] “Smithsonian Bids For New Museum,” The New York Times, January 20, 1954.

[8] Ibid.

[9] “Making a Modern Museum”.

[10] “Smithsonian Gets Praise—And Money,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, June 9, 1955; Paul Sampson, “President Asks $2,288,000 More for New Museum,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, June 30, 1955.

[11] “$36 Million Museum Voted By Committee,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, May 21, 1955.

[12] “Museum Is Shrine to Rise of U.S. as Nation,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, January 23, 2964.

[13] “Temple of Technology,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, January 24, 1964

[14] Michael Kernan, “Light in the Attic: Remaking the Museum of American History,” The Washington Post, July 20 1982.

[15] Ibid.

[16] National Museum of American History, “Introduction: Patrick F. Taylor Foundation Object Project,” http://americanhistory.si.edu/object-project.

Interning at the National Museum of American History

This summer, I completed my internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) in the Division of Home and Community Life (HCL). HCL is the largest division in the museum, responsible for the care, research, and development of collections that illustrate the daily lives of Americans since the country’s founding.[1] As such, curators in the division research a variety of topics, such as home furnishings, domestic production, patterns of migration and immigration, and the development of leisure time.[2]

As a curatorial intern at NMAH, my experience involved several components. I worked on two projects this summer; the first involved conducting archival research for an exhibit my supervisor is guest curating at a smaller history museum. This research was done as part of collaborative team—I worked with a fellow public history graduate student from California, and an American Studies graduate student from New York. The three of us approached our work in different ways, yet we worked extremely well together. The second project (which I worked on independently) involved the accessioning and cataloging of a new collection which documented the life of an African American family that moved to the Montana Territory after Emancipation. As someone who has been interested in collections and collections management, this was an invaluable experience, which I will explore in more detail in future posts.

The second component of my internship involved learning about the both the museum and the Smithsonian as institutional entities, as well as their commitment to research. I attended a variety of meetings: meetings of the HCL curators, collections meetings concerning “born digital” collections, planning meetings for upcoming public events, and a teach-in centered on making the Smithsonian more accessible to visitors with a variety of physical and emotional needs. I also attended the museum’s monthly staff meeting, in which curators from NMAH, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and the soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) discussed the ways in which language can be used to communicate powerful and complicated ideas in a more purposeful and inclusive manner. On Tuesday afternoons, I attended the weekly Colloquium, in which Smithsonian fellows shared their research in process, covering a wide array of topics, from art history, to latent narratives in collections, to the history of human modeling for computer graphics.

My supervisor introduced a third component to my internship—visiting other museums to examine and analyze museum practice in other settings. We visited NMAI, the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. It was an interesting experience to visit these other museums while simultaneously wearing the hats of “everyday visitor” and “graduate student figuring out how these sites function”. On these excursions, we were able to take mini deep-dives into the different exhibits, learning the politics behind how an object gets included (or excluded), and just discussing if and how curation for a history museum is similar and different from curation for an art museum.

Currently, the cultural and civic relevance of museums is rightly under critical scrutiny. Knowing and understanding this heightened my awareness not just of the spaces I inhabited throughout my internship, but also of the objects being collected (or not). In my future posts, I am interested in exploring the history of NMAH and how it is related to the nature of its collections.

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[1] Office of Fellowships and Internships, Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Opportunities for Research and Study, 2017. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 37. http://www.smithsonianofi.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/SORS-2017.pdf

[2] Ibid.

Schifferstadt Architectural Museum Post 3

In the final few weeks of my internship at the Schifferstadt Architectural Museum, I have been working on various interchanging projects. At the forefront has been my research of grants. Since Schifferstadt is a non-profit, the museum board and administration is always looking for ways to raise money and gather support for the museum. Prior to this internship, I had no experience with grant work.  However, in the last few weeks, I have begun learning the process of searching for, filling out, and completing grants.  To undergo the grant process, I have begun intensive historical research on the Schifferstadt museum, learning about the original family who created and constructed the museum, the line of ownership of the museum throughout the years, and the various architectural features of the museum. Through this research, I have been able to update the information that the museum gives to its visitors during tours and on brochures and pamphlets.  Though grant forms and processes are intricate and difficult to begin, I am glad that I have gained experience with grant work. I expect this knowledge will be helpful to me later on in my career and look forward to putting my early practice and work at Schifferstadt to good use.

Aside from grant work, I believe my biggest undertaking in these last few days was my sole management of the museum for the period of one week. Towards the end of the month, my boss left the Schifferstadt museum in my care. I was in charge of greeting and interacting with visitors and guests who came by and managing other day to day procedures.  After working at the museum for over a month, I had accumulated enough training and knowledge to give visitors a tour of the house and its history (for instance, pointing out its original family- the Brunners- and its eventual ownership by the Frederick County Landmarks Foundation in the 1970s whom bought the house to prevent it from becoming a gas station).  It was also during this time that the museum acquired a new wooden spinning wheel to put on display and workers found a Brunner bible dating back to what we believe was the 1800s. In the following days of the bible discovery, I began planning an exhibit piece to showcase the new find in an interesting and intriguing way.

My summer at the Schifferstadt museum has been a valuable and rewarding experience.  I have come to understand the amount of work and effort that must go into a museum to keep it up, running, and available to the public.  However, the biggest insight that I will take with me after completing this internship is the importance of strong, growing relationships between local museums and their community.  Elizabeth Crooke presents a similar insight into small museums in her work “Museums and Community” in which she states, “the word “community” seems to have replaced “audience,” “public,” and “visitor”; the new term seems to reflect the more comprehensive, welcoming, and relevant service that museums are aspiring to create.” (170).  During my time at Schifferstadt, I witnessed the museum’s aspirations to provide a welcoming center where the local residents of Frederick can explore their history and heritage through interactive exhibitions and collections.  I hope that in the future I will be able to continue witnessing these dynamic relationships between museum and community.  

Crooke, Elizabeth. “Museums and Community.” A Companion to Museum Studies (2006): 171-185. 

THE EXPO: PART TWO

One of the many responsibilities of the Vermont Historical Society (VHS) is to be liaison between the many small local historical societies and historic museums across the state. VHS runs The League of Historical Societies & Museums, an umbrella network that provides such services as educational programs and workshops, awards, a newsletter and collection care assistance. They also organize the Vermont History Expo where every historical society and museum is invited to create a “pop-up” exhibit relating to the year’s theme. This year’s theme was H20: The Power of Water in Vermont’s History. Towns shared stories about historic floods, water-powered mills and factories, river-based commerce, bridges, winter sports, and many other topics. Over 100 organizations curated original pop-up exhibits for the event. Prior to the Expo, VHS even offered a workshop on curating traveling exhibits. At the Expo I was informed that Vermont has more town historical societies per capita than any other state in the nation. Their website states there are, “more than 280 local historical societies, museums and heritage organizations throughout the state.” Considering that the population of Vermont is just over 600,000, it does seem like a tremendous amount of historical institutions.

If there is one understanding that I took away from my experience at the 2016 Expo, it is the level of pride that Vermonters have for the heritage and history of their individual towns. Other events at the Expo, besides the two large barns housing the historical society exhibits, included author talks, a bookstore, a living history village, livestock shows, food vendors, live music in the bandstand and a children’s learning area. However, at every moment of the day visitation in the historical society’s barns surpassed all other areas. When talking to expo-goers, it indeed seemed that the town exhibits are what visitors walked away remembering. The intentional partnerships VHS has made with the many town historical societies help to create a wonderful display of ubiquitous history at the Expo. The story one receives is the historical experience of hundreds of towns at once. What is significant to the members of one historical society is often entirely different from their neighboring town, and some of these towns have only a few hundred residents!  

            During the afternoon on both days, the program coordinator handed me a digital recorder and sent me into the crowd to interview visitors about their experience at the Expo, and what it was about Vermont history that they connected with personally. She wanted to collect these recordings for a future project, most likely for a podcast that is still in the process of being developed. Feeling confident in my interviewing skills having recently taken an oral history class, I jumped at the opportunity, not to mention any excuse to get out of the selling tickets in the parking lot. In interviewing roughly 50 people for 6 minutes each, essentially what I was collecting is what oral historian Donald Ritchie might call a, “broad sweep of a community’s history.” (2015, 36) An ideal oral history interview would last up to two hours (2015, 77) but without that sort of timeframe, my goal was to simply try and capture a brief understanding of how visitors were connecting to the Expo on an individual and emotional level.

All except for one person that I approached agreed to do an interview with me. I found this surprising. Putting a microphone in front of someone can make them feel uneasy. I would assume this would be heightened if the interview is a surprise and there is a chance that the recording will be placed on a public platform like the Internet. Post-expo I found myself pondering why so many visitors agreed to be recorded. To explore this I began to dissect how visitors may have perceived me as an interviewer. Oral historians hold that the interviewer has equal agency with the interviewee in the making of the historical document. (Grele 1991, 247) This is exhibited in their research-based knowledge of the interview topic and/or subject as well as their interviewing skills. Ronald Grele notes that oral historians are often insiders in the communities that they engage with. (1991, 254) In turn, interviewees understand that the oral historian is invested and a trust of intention can naturally form. Almost every visitor I interviewed was from Vermont. The few that weren’t were from the neighboring regions of New Hampshire and New York. I shared with every interviewee what town I grew up in. They knew the town; it was not unlike the towns where they came from. This I think made room for a natural ease of familiarity in the interview. I was also aware of my physical appearance. I am twenty-nine years old but am often mistaken for being younger than I am. This may have given me a certain advantage. Seeming “green” could have put interviewees at ease, not perceiving me to be an expert in anything. My other thoughts on the high number of willing participants in my interviews: upon propositioning interviewees I incorporated the words “quick” and “easy questions” into my spiel. Also, they may have held trust or admiration for my representative institution.   

On a separate level, Vermont Historical Society was making what some would consider a brilliant PR move by sending me out there with a recorder. VHS was taking steps to strengthen their connections in the community as well as boost their institutional presence. Ritchie observes that, “oral history offers unique opportunities for reaching members of a community who might not otherwise use a library or archive.” (2015, 189) Increasing their institutional name may lead not only to an increase of visitors at their archives but also an increase in membership and other types of funding for the institution. In addition, VHS now holds these 50 or so interviews. Working these into an interesting public product, such as a podcast, could boomerang that individual’s connection to the institution. By releasing a VHS podcast, the interviewees voice, their opinion and experience, is validated by a respected institution. Social historian Tamara Hareven asserts that the average citizen can find, “great difficulty in making the connection between their own lives and the historical process.” (1996, 249) That is to say that some people find it hard to understand why their lives are historically significant if they are not famous or have not been involved in a famous event.

 A standard question that I asked every visitor was, “what do you like/love about Vermont?” I enjoyed asking this question because it seemed to provoke the most thoughtful and emotional responses from my interviewees. As they wandered the Expo they read signage that created a patchwork of stories forming a historical framework of experience in the state. No doubt they were grappling themselves with what made this region unique and how they fit into it, and if they agreed or disagreed with the history that was being presented. I was excited to be able to record their reactions and I’m glad that VHS created a space to do this.

References:

            Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Grele, Ronald J., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, 2^nd ed. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991.

Hareven, Tamara. “The Search for Generational Memory.” In Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, 2^nd ed. edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, 241-256. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 1996.