May 7, 2024Sarah Jackson 3 No Comments

Internship: Planning for the Ongoing- Projects and Time in Small House Museums

By Emsie Lovejoy

In the fall semester of 2023, I had the pleasure of undertaking an internship at the Gibson House Museum, a Gilded Age townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay. Based upon my interest in working with their physical collection and learning about their collections management system, curator Meghan Holmes suggested that I might tackle the project of designing room guides for their internal use. The room guides would act as a resource for Gibson House tour guides and staff, to quickly find answers to visitor questions about objects in the collection. It was something that had been on the “want to do” list for a long time but hadn’t made it to the top of the list yet. The Gibson House Museum staff is quite small, and there is no shortage of projects in the works on any given day. One of the first big lessons for me was that things happen slowly at small museums like this, and they can’t be rushed.

*The Gibson House from the Beacon St. sidewalk. Courtesy of The Gibson House Museum https://www.thegibsonhouse.org/the-building*

One of the most important aspects of the project was that it was always intended to be ongoing. The expectation was never that I would come in and do all the room guides. Rather, I was going to lay the foundation, but after my semester the GHM would still be adding to them. So, it was crucial that whatever I came up with be both easy to update, and easy to replicate: the systems I designed would need to be straightforward enough for someone else to pick up where I left off, with a minimal learning curve.

I made a few trial runs at formats that were ultimately too difficult to reorganize before I was forced to admit that what I was really trying to do was reinvent the spreadsheet. So, I made a spreadsheet. I moved the process to Google Sheets with the idea that the text could be finished and arranged there and then migrated to a polished document with the photographs once it was finalized. However, since images can in fact be included in Sheets, and it offers endless opportunities to add, remove, and re-arrange without creating extra work, we ultimately decided to leave the final RG in spreadsheet format. Aesthetically it might have been more satisfying to take that last step of copying things over to a different format, but realistically it would have added a lot more work for me, and whoever picks up the project next.

The other reason flexibility was so critical to this project is that we couldn’t know at the beginning how many things that seemed obvious would need to be rethought. During the process of creating the final format, Meghan and I had many conversations about identifying the most important characteristics of an object for the purposes of a finding guide. Yes, everything would have a photo, but would it be faster to find a specific object if it were organized by category? If so, what were the categories? Or should it be ordered by location in the room? If by location, was a list format actually the most useful, or should we find a way to map the space? Was there a way to organize objects according to how frequently visitors ask about them? As we tested out different classifications and configurations, it quickly became clear that the ease of using a program that would sort material for us was the only way to go. If every time we had wanted to try a new method of categorization I had been reorganizing manually, we simply wouldn’t have tested out as many possibilities. Trial and error gave us, I think, an excellent final product, but without that flexibility trial and error would have been out of reach. Presumably, this will continue to be a factor for the next people working on this, since one of the major decisions we made was that the format should be approached on a case-by-case basis and adapted to the needs of a given space, rather than trying to impose a single structure on every room in the house.

To that end, rather than a rigid blueprint, what I finally produced for the GHM is more like a menu. The plan is to place binders in each room, in out-of-the-way locations where they will not be especially noticeable. Each of the binders will include:

A list of Top 5 Objects, those which prompt the most visitor questions
Full room guide organized by category

Depending on the room and the specific needs of the space, the binders may also contain:

Maps of object-dense areas, with the corresponding Map Keys
Lists divided by region of the room, to be determined on a case-by-case basis
Lists of types of objects (i.e. silver pieces in the Dining Room)

All of the paintings will be represented on a separate, visitor-accessible sheet, to cut down on the amount of material to sort through in the room guides.

*An example of the photo maps to be used in Gibson House Museum room guides.*

Knowing that I would not be completing the room guides project, I created online templates for each of these ‘menu’ items, which I have handed over to the GHM. I also produced a detailed instruction manual for their use and some context for thinking through the sorts of questions we confronted throughout the process. A further consideration in making these materials is how they will be used going forward. The room guides are likely to be something that gets worked on in fits and starts when they have the time between other projects, so we wanted these systems to be straightforward enough that one could come back to it without having to relearn anything significant.

At the end of my semester with the Gibson House, I felt entirely satisfied with the materials I handed off to them. I finished one room guide that uses all of the elements listed above, so we all got to see the finished product and get a sense of how to use it, and the responses that I received from the museum staff were extremely positive.

References:
“Room Guide,” Longfellow House – Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. Accessed September 2023.

April 11, 2024Sarah Jackson 3 No Comments

Internship: The Significance of Displaying Insignificant Histories

By Hawraa Chreim

As part of my internship at the Massachusetts State Archives, I have had the opportunity to curate an exhibit solely based on my research in the institution’s collection. I ultimately landed on my topic while shadowing my supervisor Caitlin Ramos on a research request of prison records from the 1940s. I got swept up in the intrigue of learning about the individual stories concerning prison inmates. My focus shifted directly to incarcerated women in the early 1900s. What were the charges against them? What were prison standards for women of the time? What were their stories? These were the main questions that shaped my initial research. Slowly analyzing case files from the boxes of the Framingham State’s Prison, I finally landed on a file that spoke to me.

Photograph taken on July 4^th, 1921, at the Framingham State Prison. This photograph of women prisoners celebrating the holiday was taken while Mary was incarcerated.
Registers of Vital Records 1841-1930. Marriage of Mary Malone and Daniel Schancks, 1919 volume 33 page 44. HS6.07/ series 1411. Massachuettes Archives. Boston, Massachusetts.

Mary Shanks became the focus of my exhibit. A woman who had no significant meaning in history, who largely would’ve been forgotten, had now become the center of my research at the Massachusetts Archives. Looking through her file, I had to be very analytical in my research. The files consisted of hundreds of pages that included: indictments, medical records, family history, correspondence, and photographs. The physical fragility of the documentation was one of my greatest difficulties in working with this collection. Mary’s records covered mainly the years between 1920 and 1930. Assumed to never be reopened, the documents were on thin parchment and the letters were in barely torn envelopes, looking as if they had not been touched since they had been written. With every turn and page adjustment, I had to be very careful in order to retain the integrity of the documents and I felt inspired by holding history in my own hands.

Deciding how to tell Mary Shanks’ story, however, was the real challenge. Mary Shanks had one challenging life. Born in Fall River, she was raised by her parents, in poverty and neglect. Like many women in her situation, Mary took up domestic work in her hometown. She married in 1919 but her life took a turbulent turn. Over the next decade, Mary and her husband were in and out of jail. Letters between the two, while Mary was incarcerated, reveal that their tumultuous relationship took an unfortunate toll on her mental state.

As a researcher, Mary was a tricky subject as the crime she was indicted for had no specific meaning. Poor women from lower classes were often defined as “guilty” of the crime of “Idle and disorderly”; this could mean disorderly conduct, begging, homelessness, or prostitution, for example. I felt inclined to be the narrator of her life and offer her a chance for the world to see her as a person who struggled with the harsh standards set for women in the early 20^th century, not just as a woman who was incarcerated. Information about her and her family’s mental histories and medical records could have voiced an entirely new perspective. Yet, due to the state laws and common ethics in archival practice, releasing any information about a person’s medical history is illegal. Thus, I put myself in Mary’s shoes and focused instead on her story through the years of her incarceration.

Blueprints of the original mapping design of the Framingham State Prison in the late 19^th century. Facility Plans Circa 1874. Framingham Reformatory for Women Blueprint. HS9.06/ series 1100x. Massachusetts Archives. Boston, Massachusetts.

The documentation in Mary’s files is extensive and illuminates the relationship between her, her husband and daughter, and her extended family. To create a dynamic exhibit, I worked with Caitlin to find material on her incarceration beyond the documents in Mary’s prison record. We discovered the blueprint map of the Framingham State Prison when it was first built, the marriage certificate and birth certificates, photographs of prisoners at the time of Mary’s incarceration, and prison visitation records, to name a few. The goal now had become how to tell Mary’s story within the framework of her incarceration using as many different forms of archival media and records as possible. I wanted to show the range of the collection that was held within the archives repository while simultaneously telling the story of Mary Shanks. I hope visitors to the exhibit will be able to connect to the story of Mary and her life, and that the letters, photos, and documents humanize her. Who is Mary and why is her story important?

April 10, 2024Sarah Jackson 3 No Comments

Internship: An Exhibit for Local 201

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

This past June, I jumped into the deep end of twentieth-century labor history with my graduate internship at the Lynn Museum. Lynn, Massachusetts has been an industrial town for well over a century, with a radical labor voice exemplified by IUE-CWA Local 201, the labor union at Lynn’s General Electric complex. For my internship, I have been building an exhibit about Local 201—building a research library, listening to the oral histories conducted by UMass Boston’s Labor Resource Center, finding digital and physical assets, building an interpretive plan, designing an exhibit script and panels, and working with community stakeholders. It’s been an amazing ride.

*One of my steps to developing the exhibit: taking photos of the physical space and drafting up a proposed layout using my tablet. Good fun!*

Preparing for the Internship

As part of my Public History practicum course in Spring 2021 with Professor Jane Becker, I worked with my peers on building an online exhibit, Corridor to Revolutions, for which I created the article “Abolitionism” and helped design the look of the site. I really enjoyed studying antebellum Boston—a particular interest of mine—and finding specific locations, images, and objects that helped tell the story of Boston’s antislavery movement. After years writing research papers, the pivot to incorporating story through assets and captions was fascinating—and fun. Public history is fun, you guys!

In Spring 2023, I worked again with Professor Becker in a practicum course to design an interpretive plan for a hypothetical reworking of Faneuil Hall’s Great Hall. While our work was purely hypothetical (and therefore unrestricted by timelines and budget), it was an excellent exercise in developing the shape of an exhibit.

Going in, I knew my weak spots for this project were my lack of a labor history background and my inexperience with designing a real, physical exhibit. However, I knew I had great mentors in my internship supervisor Doneeca Thurston, Executive Director of the Lynn Museum, and Professor Nick Juravich, who teaches labor studies and history.

Getting Started

Luckily for me, the LRC and Professor Juravich had done a lot of work on the Local 201 history project before I came on board in June. The LRC has conducted over fifty oral histories of Local 201 members as of this August. Professor Juravich had compiled a number of sources by and about union members, and in my early research I found even more—newspaper articles, academic articles, and videos, to name a few.

*The Labor Resource Center’s oral history project is hosted at Healey Library’s Open Archives, accessible* *here*.

In early June, I met with stakeholders from the Local to help determine the main themes of the exhibit. Unlike other projects I’ve worked on, this exhibit is inextricably tied to a vibrant, passionate organization. Knowing their desires for the exhibit was crucial to building an interpretive plan and the exhibit script itself, their feedback has been vital.

Interpretive Plan, Exhibit Script, and Panels

I developed an interpretive plan based on the key themes from that first meeting using the template from Professor Becker’s Spring 2023 practicum, which includes historical themes and topics, the “big idea,” material evidence, audience and goals, and presentation. For a big idea, or overarching interpretive message, I came up with the following:

The IUE Local 201 union at GE Lynn has enabled members to engage in community, work to improve their working conditions, and exert their rights through a democratic structure and militant activism throughout their ninety-year history.

Key words for the exhibit, to carry us through, were militant, democratic, activism, labor, and community. Key themes include working at GE (i.e. what does the work entail); union independence, democracy, and leadership; the Women’s Committee; fighting racism; health and safety; and surviving in the new economy (i.e. neoliberalism, globalism, and supplier migration).

These key themes mapped nicely into a semi-chronological exhibit script, starting with defining key terms (what exactly is a union? good question!), early union history, and working at GE, then moving through the various committees that were founded in the 1970s, and ending with more recent history like NAFTA, supplier migration, and current community engagement. I am very grateful for Professor Juravich’s help with the early panels in particular—thanks to his background in labor history, his introduction to the exhibit is engaging and succinct.

Finding arresting assets (photos, videos, and material objects) was one of the major challenges of this project. While the Local has an enormous archive, it’s mostly paper records, which aren’t best suited to engaging visitors. However, they prepared a selection of materials for my perusal, from which I was able to find some fascinating assets that showcase the communal, activist spirit of Local 201: photos of floats at rallies; shirts for various campaigns and strikes; buttons for elections, events, strikes, campaigns, and more. Beyond that, the Lynn Museum has some gripping photos, and they just discovered a 1920s-era toolbox from a GE employee as well.

This laminated card with attached button is one of my favorite finds from the Local’s archive. Here’s the label I wrote for it: “The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 forbade any member of the Communist Party from holding office in labor unions—and the button on the bottom right shows that the CIO was proud to be anti-Communist.”
*Courtesy of Local 201.*

*These slips of paper were tucked into the toolbox at the Lynn Museum—I especially love the middle top grand drawing for a case of liquor from 1960! Talk about community.*
*Courtesy of the Lynn Museum*

Moving onto the physical side of the exhibit, I drafted exhibit panels using Canva (protip: nonprofits get access to Canva’s premium service for free with a simple application). I was grateful here for Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels, which helped me figure out font size and word counts for my panels. Because a large part of our audience—union retirees—are older, I went with larger text to ensure they’d have an easy time reading, not least of all because some of our panels will be over a piano!

This is a portion of a panel in the “Local Goes National” segment, which discusses the foundation of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), World War II, the postwar strikes (seen here), and the resulting backlash.

The Hardest Part

A few weeks ago, we sent off the exhibit script and panel drafts to our key stakeholders in the union. Lo and behold, they were excited… but also worried. Because early oral histories and many of our key stakeholders were a specific demographic among 201 members (college-educated, non-Lynn-locals), we had inadvertently left out important voices and stories. As it stood, they weren’t ready to give the exhibit their stamp of approval.

Professor Juravich and I both spoke to concerned union members, and together with Doneeca, we drafted a plan for moving forward. I spoke with one stakeholder over the phone, to whom I said, “If you’re not comfortable, we’re not comfortable!”

Getting over the sting of critique and focusing on the important partnership was key to rebuilding accord with our stakeholders. I’m excited to move forward with the project knowing that everyone is more comfortable with it! Our goal is to tell varied stories, not just one, and it’s stakeholder feedback that pushed us further in that multivocal direction. With our new plan, we’ve got key steps for moving forward to highlight Lynners, broaden the types of voices and stories being told, and create an exhibit everyone can be proud of.

April 10, 2024Sarah Jackson 3 No Comments

Internship: Dealing With Sensitive Histories: Contextualization, Not Erasure

By Kristen Thompson

My internship with Historic New England has been a valuable learning experience. It has opened my eyes to some of the real work that goes on in the public history field, and all of the moving parts that go along with it. Historic New England oversees many historic house museums throughout the region and those houses, obviously, come with a plethora of objects that are not always savory to the modern mind or eye. Thankfully, and in a practice I think should be emulated by other institutions – historic or not -when dealing with some of the more uncomfortable aspects of the past, Historic New England does not attempt to hide away the less than appealing parts of their collection; instead they seek to contextualize them and acknowledge that, while the problematic themes of the pieces are not and have never been okay, they existed and here is the reason that it is at this particular site. This has been the focus area of my internship.

Rifleman Figurine at Roseland Cottage Photographer Eric Roth

Under the project that Historic New England calls “Sensitive Objects Research,” the interns have been tasked with researching some of the more, well, sensitive objects that are a part of Historic New England’s collection. I have spent the majority of my internship researching a figurine that can be found at Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut. The figurine, created sometime between 1875 and 1890, was previously described as a “Turk or Indian rifleman,” (Historic New England) a rather vague description that does little to actually contextualize the piece. Upon first glance, the figurine, which stands only eighteen inches high, is a bit jarring to look at and is a good example of the problematic art that was often produced during the Orientalist movement, an academic and artistic field of study that portrayed an exoticized image of Eastern cultures. The figurine is nearly a caricature of a Muslim man, wearing a turban on his head and a lion’s skin on his hip.

In my research, I have been able to ascertain that the figurine is most likely of Islamic origin, but whether it is from the Middle East or the Moorish Iberian Peninsula is uncertain. Either way, the experience I have gained in researching these objects that have very little pre-existing context or information has been invaluable. It has forced me to be a bit more creative in my research process, learning to look at things in different ways and to come at them from different angles in order to find relevant information on a piece that is a bit of a mystery. For example, leaning more into the history of the Orientalism movement and the history of the silk trade has been extremely helpful in this case. The Orientalist movement had turned the East into a spectacle for Western consumption, and has been criticized as being a more accurate portrayal of what the East was made to be in the eyes of the Western world than what it actually was. Orientalism was rooted in the offensive ideology that Eastern civilizations were stuck in the past and could not represent themselves, and that they needed the more advanced Western world to guide them into the future. In Edward Said’s critique of the field in his 1978 book Orientalism, he sums up what he felt the attitude of many so-called “orientalists” to be: “They are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves” (Said, 1978). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, Orientalism began to shift from a more niche, male dominated field to a commodity in the American market, particulary among upperclass white women (Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, Mari Yoshihara, 2002). Objects such as the figurine I have been researching would have been seen as a fashionable status symbol, and while individual collectors might have had an appreciation for Asian inspired styles, there was generally little respect for the actual cultures that inspired it.

Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, CT
Photographer David Bohl

Historic New England’s efforts in contextualization are commendable, and should serve as an example for other institutions that may have to reckon with sensitive historic material. It can be all too tempting to shy away from the grittier parts of the past in favor of highlighting the more palatable, but that paints only half a picture and it is our duty as historians to present our audience with all of the information that we can, otherwise we risk a grave misunderstanding.

As Timothy Baumann, Andrew Hurley, Valerie Altizer, and Victoria Love say in their 2011 article “Interpreting Uncomfortable History at the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri” in The Public Historian, “Uplifting versions of history that refuse to acknowledge shameful, tragic, or repulsive events, they [scholars] argue, not only violate professional standards of objectivity but ultimately damage the credibility of the institutions that deliver history to the public” (Baumann, Hurley, Alitzer, and Love, 2011).