Finalizing Our Project: Black Power Chronicles

Now that we've made our URCAD submission, our attention has shifted towards developing our presentation. 

Kevin's been doing a really great job making edits to the appearance of the map and developing the codes necessary for our excel spreadsheet entries to transfer. Cyrus has been trying to find the corresponding geographic location for each event and has been making progress. I've spent the past couple of weeks looking for images that would suffice for our interactive map, making minor edits to excel spreadsheet, and trying to develop our URCAD presentation itself. I've had some trouble trying to find pictures that were taken in Washington D.C. of the black power movement. I've been in contact with the Washingtonia to try and pull pictures and information from the newspaper article available but that's been a challenge in itself. A lot of the documents they pulled for me was for the black power movement across the U.S. and not necessarily focused on the events that occurred in Washington D.C. 

Although we're wrapping up our project and finalizing our presentation, there's still some things we have to figure out for April. We're planning on meeting after spring break to talk more about how we want to present and what exactly we want to showcase during that presentation. Overall, I'm pretty excited. We've been working pretty hard these past three months and the project is slowly coming to a close. It'll be really interesting seeing how everyone receives our presentation--an interactive map that displays the location of an event with the corresponding event description. April 23rd--here we come!!

Using History in Politics?

Hello everyone!

My name is Claire McCormack and I am a senior at UMBC, studying Political Science and History at the Shady Grove campus. Going into my final semester of college (knock-on-wood!), I knew I wanted to undertake an internship that would help me narrow down my vision of my future career.

When Kathleen Matthews, the Chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, spoke in one of my classes last semester, something about her inspired me. She was well-spoken and incredibly smart, but most importantly, she seemed genuinely passionate about the work she was doing with her team. I realized then that my enthusiasm for the advancement of progressive causes really aligned with the mission of the Maryland Democratic Party, and that if I worked there, I would be able to learn from a truly enthusiastic team that Kathleen leads. Critically, I could also learn to apply the vital professional and academic skills history courses have taught me to a real-world setting.

Within a week of meeting Kathleen, I was able to interview and secure an internship for this semester with the Maryland Democratic Party. I was thrilled: excited to be doing something new and exciting, fighting for issues that are relevant to me, and ready for the challenge of showing off my critical thinking, writing, and analysis skills in more than just the classroom. I was also incredibly excited to get to know Annapolis, pictured below on my first day in January.

As a Maryland Democratic Party intern, I have the unique opportunity to get hands-on experience in many different areas. I’m most closely working with the data director and field team, but have had the opportunity to work on political assignments as well. So far, I have really enjoyed getting to speak with voters. I have definitely used the critical listening and questioning skills my public history classes have helped me develop. For instance, last semester I interviewed the executive director of a museum, which made me practice creating a diverse range of questions, and making an environment where people feel comfortable to express both their likes and dislikes, their successes and their failures. 

So far I am absolutely loving my internship- I am so greatful to work here! I look forward to seeing what the next month holds for me. 

URCAD: Submission and Preparation

We've come to the point where we have enough content to submit to URCAD. I've spent a lot of time editing our event descriptions, finding photographs of the event itself, and figuring out how to finalize the project for URCAD submission. There were a few technical edits we had to make in order to ensure that the map was both accurate and functioning properly. Kevin, Ralph, and I got a chance to sit down and talk about finalizing the interactive map's website. Kevin tried to explain the logistics behind entering code for the map to us but we had a hard time understanding exactly what he was talking about. We took that as a signal to focus on our task of inputting entries into the excel sheet and left the technical changes/updates to Kevin. As for the entries, I was able to adjust some of the event descriptions based on the books I was referring to but finding pictures of these events were a bit more challenging.  I had a hard time finding pictures of a lot of the events that took place at the beginning of the 60s. I spent hours trying to find pictures of events that took place at the beginning of the black power movements development, that were either unavailable or inaccessible. I'm going to try and scout newspapers for images instead to see if I have better chances finding pictures that match the events. Dr. Musgrove had already given us a heads up about this earlier on in the project but now that we're preparing our URCAD presentation, we have to start tightening up and completing the project. At least we're on the road to finishing out our entries!

Beginning the Black Power Chronicles

I started working on this project with Dr. Musgrove a couple months after it began. My responsibility was to complete the research needed to input our data into the interactive map. I was basically tasked to look through books and news articles that documented the Black Power movement in Washington D.C. and find significant events that would both mark the events to the locations they occurred and track the progression of the movement to help answer the question--where do we go from here?

Since I didn't feel comfortable directly editing the spreadsheet, I put most of the data I retrieved onto a separate google document. I didn't want to change the work that was already completed in the months prior to me joining in on the project and wasn't really sure how to frame my language into a clear, concise description. Now that I've collected a good amount of information from the research I did scooping several books for information, all I have left to complete on my behalf is inputting that information on the spreadsheet to ensure the interactive map reflects the events that occurred at their respective location. I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens once the entries are complete. So far, so good.

Creating and Putting Up Exhibits

I am now two months into my internship and I feel a lot more settled in since my last blog post. The two exhibits I am currently working on both revolve around the diversity theme as there is a new committee on diversity that has been launched at USG which I mentioned in my earlier post. I have been working more with the library director and we decided on doing one of the exhibits on festivals and holidays around the world. I have been researching various holidays and gathering information on them for the exhibit. The second exhibit which is meant to be interactive will be a list of definitions of positive terms such as “inclusivity” which promote diversity. The exhibit will then have a place for students to write their own definitions and understanding of the term. The list of terms I came up with and their definitions according to the dictionary is complete. This should be going up in the library soon. However, the library has been understaffed lately which has made work in the library in general become very slow. It is often difficult to schedule meetings to speak to staff and have work approved, since they themselves are very busy.  Recently, I have been assigned various random jobs like arranging and organizing the hard copies of old exhibits and labeling them. The past week I helped my supervisor Nick put up picture frames in the library of photographs that students took from a Communications class. He taught me how to arrange wall exhibits and the importance of their placement. He’s also been teaching me about graphic design since he does that quite often. Even though the pace has been a slow, I am still gaining a lot of experience. I like that there is something new to do, even if it is now what I expected. I am hoping that by next semester once the library has more staff to fill in the vacant positions, I will get to spend more time with my supervisor so I can get feedback and learn from him more often.

Hectic Summer part 3: Both Sides of the Coin (so what does this all add up to anyway?)

So, I had a really busy summer.  Apart from several new lines in my resume and a pretty chronic case of sleep deprivation, what did I get out of it?

Well, it all goes back to what my 300 teacher kept telling us about jobs in the field of public history (I’m assuming that everyone reading this post is a history major, or at least familiar with the department): there are a few groups that are very well funded and there are a lot of smaller groups getting by as best they can.  More or less accidentally, I got to see both sides of the coin at once.  The Sandy Spring Museum is small and mostly focused on the community, while I’m not sure how you could get much bigger than the National Archives.  

In my spare time at Sandy Spring, I looked up grants and resources to restore a 200-year-old wedding dress that they held in the archives, which was becoming too fragile to put on display.  The National Archives, on the other hand, has the facilities and specially-trained staff to custom-make acid-free archival containers specifically for individual items in their collection if necessary.  I saw them during the tour of the conservation department.  At Sandy Spring, I helped with the setup for filming a fundraising video aimed at raising money to fix a pretty serious ongoing problem, which the Archives would have gotten fixed immediately.  Sandy Spring’s computers, at least the staff ones that I used, are so old that they run Windows 98 and only support Internet Explorer.  The National Archives has a modern, fully-integrated, secure network, not to mention all of the specialized scanning and imaging equipment that I used.  Sandy Spring has one part-time professional librarian/archivist and a handful of volunteers, while I can’t actually find a concrete estimate of the number of people employed at the Archives.

That’s not to say that Sandy Spring is inferior to the Archives, they just have a lot less money to put toward the same basic cause of preserving the past.  Frankly, I believe that the Sandy Spring Museum is a great success story; it has managed to find a way to remain relevant to the admittedly small community that it serves, even on a limited budget.  While both places have people passionately dedicated to their central tenets, Sandy Spring is far more firmly integrated into the community.  At Sandy Spring, they have entire exhibits on the history of specific local landmarks and movements, people in the community feel free to wander in, make suggestions, even loan pieces of art for exhibits.  At the Archives, none of this is possible; the Archives is simply too big, its mission too broad.  Sandy Spring is public history on the local scale, the Archives is much larger, and also much more formalized.  Neither approach is better than the other, and each can complement the other.  That’s one of the points that my teacher was trying to make, and I think that actually getting to experience that for myself in real time was really special.  I had a really fantastic opportunity this past summer, and I hope that I made the most of it.

The Historic Medley District Part III

Concluding at The Historic Medley District (For Now)

While the semester comes to a close, my work at the Historic Medley District continues. The process of cataloging the different documents and archives I am sorting through has not sped up, but it has definitely become less monotonous in nature. I recently came across a small cache of documents related to a Poolesville resident who had been a Prisoner of War in Germany during the Second World War. Many of these documents revolve around the publication of his memoir detailing his experience as a POW, but many others are correspondence between him and different Veterans organizations. These pieces of correspondence were written in regards to locating several of the men who had been part of this man’s bomber crew during the war. It is through recording and cataloging items such as these that make me feel as though I am doing something worthwhile, as these papers could have easily been forgotten if they had remained in the file boxes they had been stored in over a decade ago.

I plan on continuing my work at the HMD after this semester is finished. Even after these first several months, I haven’t quite scratched the surface of what I had naively set out to accomplish at the beginning of September. It will probably take another several months, and much hard work, to catalog the rest of these files. From there, the process of digitizing what I have cataloged and then turning that into a functional archive will undoubtedly take even longer. My hope is that, even if I am unable to finish what I intended to, I will at least have set up the enough of a foundation of work that it can serve as a starting point for whoever comes along next.