Tag: Graduate Internship

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.

Internship: Dealing With Sensitive Histories: Contextualization, Not Erasure

April 10, 2024 / Sarah Jackson 3 / 0 Comments

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).

A photograph of the Tavern Wall, A wooden bulletin board covered with posted papers in the basement of Faneuil Hall.

Internship: Designing for the Public

December 18, 2022 / Rebecca M Beit-Aharon / 2 Comments

By Maci Mark.

Over the past few months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on my internship project with the National Parks of Boston while also serving as a Seasonal Park Ranger. For this project I have been working with the Digital Humanities and Innovation Team to research, write, and design new waysides for the USS Cassin Young. The goal of this project is to provide more context, interpretation, and connection for the ship for people who do not come aboard (due to restricted mobility or other factors like weather). When coming on board this project I was excited to further develop my skills of writing for the public; this is something that I know is important, as it is often a first impression and is the first chance to help people connect to a historic site. But I was surprised by another skill that I worked to cultivate over the past few months as well: designing for the public.

I had experience in writing for the public in other contexts, writing blog posts for UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in my work in Hist 682 Digital Public History, and as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College working on digital humanities projects there. But writing for waysides was a new to me task, both in how it provides information, the constraints of limited text, but also because of the important role played by design. If it is not eye catching, easy to read, and in an accessible location people are not going to stop and read. The design is a key aspect of a wayside.

I first got the chance to work with design this summer when working on the Tavern Wall we have at Faneuil Hall. Located in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall, the Tavern Wall is a space where we can anonymously engage with visitors to read their thoughts and reflections. We pose a thematic question, provide background information, and further reading through a QR code if interested. Our Tavern Wall acts similarly to the way that literal tavern walls would have had papers, flyers, and pamphlets posted on them. Literally planks of wood with nails in it for visitors to post their responses to our prompt, it also creates an anonymous forum for engagement.

Tavern Wall prompts and information are generally changed monthly, and when I started my season in May I was given the opportunity to work on the June Tavern Wall and create one for Pride Month. I worked alongside my coworkers to help write the EQ (Essential Question which guided the theme of the wall) and was then given the opportunity to design the wall myself. I strove to create an eye-catching wall that was easy to read and did not overwhelm with information.

A photograph of a poster about Pride Month being laminated. — *The posters are laminated for longevity, one of the final steps in creating the Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

The Pride Month Tavern Wall ended up with two informational posters about the 1977 Gay and Lesbian Town Hall Meetings that occurred there and posted QR codes so that visitors could read further on the town hall meeting if they were interested. It evolved around the EQ: What does Pride Mean to You? Overall, this Wall was a success with 80+ responses over the three weeks it was up, ranging from all age groups, and varying from a picture of a pride parade to a long paragraph about someone’s journey to coming out.

Working on this Tavern Wall both showed me how meaningful anonymous interactions like this can be, and also the importance of design. Ease of engagement also contributed to the success of this Tavern Wall, as it offered multiple forms of engagement, from reading, to answering, to scanning QR code, to even just reading others responses. I included a rainbow at the top of the posters I designed, to help make it eye-catching and topical, but I also included plenty of pictures of the town hall meetings as well. When walking by the space or checking on the wall I often found visitors reading the signs and reading others’ answers. I learned a lot about design from this project, about the importance of accessibility through easy-to-read language as well as easy-to-read text, via contrast in text and background, and images, which tend to draw people in. Images, especially of the site in the past, tend to draw people in as people love to see what places looked like in the past. The NPS has accessibility standards which guided my practice. After working on this I saw good examples of both good and bad accessible writing everywhere.

A poster about Pride Month and Town Halls. — *One of the posters that was posted for the June Pride Month Tavern Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

I have had opportunities to work on and assist with two more Tavern Walls over the past few months. And I am taking what I learned about design work over the past few months with me as I enter the final stages of writing and designing the new USS Cassin Young waysides. While waysides are very different from the Tavern Wall, they are similar in providing opportunities for anonymous interaction, establishing connections, and most importantly, providing a first impression.

The lessons I learned about designing for the public can be applied in all my future public history work: the importance of font, coordinating colors, making texts accessible to read, images, and that brevity matters. But most importantly what I have learned over the course of the past few months is how important it is to make information easily accessible whether that is through diving into specific stories with Tavern Walls or through waysides, helping to provide a positive first impressions and provide a deeper understanding of the site.

Two women paint portraits in the foreground. In the background, a large portrait of a woman with plants covering her eyes sits on an easel.

Internship: No Such Thing as a Perfect Interview: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 2

July 29, 2022 / Rebecca M Beit-Aharon / 1 Comment

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Hello again!

In my first post, I talked about the origin of the research project I’m working on, including how we identified artist-in-residence programs at historic sites across the country. Of course, knowing programs exist—or existed—isn’t enough.

As you might have guessed, connecting with the sites we identified had mixed results. In many cases, my supervisor Ken Turino had personal connections thanks to his extensive public history career. I was able to connect directly to a few contacts of my own. In Professor Jane Becker’s public history practicum in Spring 2021, I worked closely with Eric Hansen-Plass of Boston National Historical Park, who confirmed that there hadn’t been an artist-in-residence program there for years. Over the summer, a colleague at the Old North Church clued me in to Ryan Ahlwardt’s song “Granary” about Paul Revere. While not a result of an AIR program, the song and music video are still fantastic examples of public history by a contemporary artist.

While some site administrators did make introductions, I mostly reached out to site personnel cold through emails, phone calls, and contact forms. I was impressed by how many responding staff were interested in our work—the ones that weren’t were generally closed or understaffed due to the pandemic. I’m particularly sorry to have missed out on interviewing staff and artists from Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, which was closed along with the rest of the Diné (Navajo) Nation due to the pandemic; I was hoping to learn how a site that prioritized Native artists—and functioned under multiple governing bodies—ran an AIR program.

…

We began the interview process by creating two parallel sets of questions: one for artists-in-residence and another for site administrators, curators, and other historic site staff who worked with AIRs. These questions were broken down roughly in terms of the timeline of creating/participating in an AIR program, starting with questions about the genesis of the program, moving on to selecting an artist and the residency itself, and closing out with final products, evaluations, and lessons learned.

Overall, we interviewed twenty-five site administrators and twenty-two artists from twenty-two sites across the country. These sites ranged in size (both physical and budgetary), but there was a notable concentration of sites in the northeast—a huge bulk of our interview sites are in New England or New York. We’re not sure if this actually reflects reality or results from our northeastern network.

A graph showing the number of full-time staff at interviewed historic sites.

Interviewing artists and site administrators—in other words, growing my network!—was a pleasure. I love talking to people about both art and history, so learning about that in tandem both practically and creatively was a joy.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect interview, certain practices helped them go smoothly. As a stickler for structure, I generally sent the interview questions in advance and followed them closely. While a more conversational style would have been more natural, I didn’t want to miss any questions. No one I spoke to had answers to every question, whether because some weren’t relevant or because institutional knowledge had been lost over time. My notes, at least, were extremely easy to organize and analyze once we hit the data analysis phase.

I spoke to people from all sorts of sites, and I ended up interviewing just about all of the artists and administrators we spoke to connected to the National Park Service. As a government institution, there are more regulations to deal with, but some of the near-universal traits of NPS AIR programs were, frankly, mind-boggling. For example, a much higher percentage of NPS sites treat AIRs as volunteers than other historic sites do (and seem almost surprised that one might pay an AIR). There’s also a clause in very fine print on the NPS volunteer contract that gives the government rights to any artwork/etc created while volunteering.

The AIR-as-volunteer model has serious drawbacks. Unpaid artists must donate not only their work but their valuable time, and only artists with enough disposable income—which leaves out a significant portion of artists, particularly emerging artists and economically disadvantaged artists—can realistically participate. By not paying the artists, these sites reinforce the notion that art is not a proper profession: as one artist pointed out, sites pay professionals to restore woodwork, artwork, and more, and they pay them at professional rates. Not paying (and underpaying) artists devalues their valuable work. Sites lose out too. Minority artists are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the benefits of AIR programs is their ability to bring new eyes to historic sites traditionally interpreted with narrow lenses. Minority voices are vital to expanding the stories told, and AIR programs are one way to reimagine sites, as Historic New England did with the portrait of Cyrus Bruce by Richard Haynes Jr. that I wrote about previously.

New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park’s AIR program provides a notable exception to this apparent “rule.” Here, the program is run by historic-site-AIR superstar Lindsay E. Compton, who created AIR programs at two other NPS sites: Congaree National Park and San Antonio Mission National Historical Site. New Bedford Whaling NHP provides an incredible example of a robust AIR program that pays its artists, taps into their community’s talent, and creates programming and art that speaks to varying and deep themes at the site and in the community. The current (when I interviewed Lindsay) artist-in-residence was doing a project on Polynesian women in whaling. Lindsay did in depth research to support the artist. For a more community-based example, April Jakubec, the AIR from January-March 2020, created four large portraits of women in the community who self-identified as having mental illness/struggles, sparking rich discussions around mental health. As an attached workshop, women were invited to paint a self-portrait and adorn the art with flowers, gems, and more to demonstrate different areas of healing (i.e. flowers over mouth: someone felt silenced).

A ground of women stand and kneel with painted self-portraits, many adorned with painted plants or flowers. — *April Jakubec’s AIR workshop in 2020. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park.*

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Check back for the final installment, where I’ll talk about data analysis, preparing a panel agenda, and presenting at conferences for NEMA, Connecticut Local History Organization, and AASLH.

Immigration in Public Education and Public History: A Brookline Non-Profit Makes an Impact

December 11, 2017 / Heidi Gengenbach / 0 Comments

By: Katie Burke

When I entered a graduate program in Public History I was often met with a resounding “I hated History in high school!” from friends and acquaintances. I could actually relate in some ways. In History class there was often a sense that we were being fed regurgitated, cliché narratives that were, well, old. Without connecting to these stories, they never really came alive.

I spent summer 2017 as a graduate intern at the Brookline-based non-profit organization, Facing History and Ourselves. Facing History works with high school educators to develop lesson plans on the Holocaust and other instances of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism. Their goal is to promote awareness of these events, and help students use historical knowledge to make thoughtful and ethical decisions in their own lives.

My main project at Facing History and Ourselves allowed me to strategize effective ways to implement their resources into regional curriculums. I researched high school social studies standards for the seven states in which they are based, and worked with my supervisor, Dimitry Anselme, to match Facing History’s educational resources to each state. As I reviewed the required content, Dimitry encouraged me to make conclusions about how immigration history is taught in these states as well, in order to tie the project into my interest in immigration in Public History.

In the past, immigration history in schools has often fallen victim to a problematically stereotypic narrative. Students heard about European immigrants sailing into New York Harbor at the turn of the 20^th century, with the Statue of Liberty in the distance, ready to embark on the “American Dream” in the “Land of Opportunity.” This overly-simplified narrative perpetuated a false nostalgia that prevented students from reckoning with the complex history of immigration in the United States. It also alienated students with the most recent ties to immigration when this narrative was a far stretch from their own experience.

Newspaper illustration of an ocean steamer passing the Statue of Liberty from the steerage deck, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1887

I was surprised to discover that many of the states’ standards outlined immigration history with nods to various ethnic groups and legislative acts. I did not remember this as a part of my own learning experience. However, immigration reporter Ted Hesson argues that, in practice, the actual teaching of immigration history is sparse or clings to the Ellis Island narrative. Additionally, state standards often stop shy of bringing lessons of immigration full circle to modern day debates. In today’s environment, where debates on immigration have become so contentious, it is important for students to be well informed on how immigration has impacted the past and present.

Facing History and Ourselves, along with a number of other organizations, have made efforts to help teachers utilize immigration history in their classrooms. Immigration has been a part of some of the major Facing History units, such as Race and Membership and Holocaust and Human Behavior. In some locations, Facing History also runs a hands-on workshop “Immigration in a Changing World: Identity, Citizenship and Belonging,” to guide teachers in creating a four-week unit that highlights the Chinese American experience from the mid-1800’s to the present. As with all Facing History lessons, these units are designed to use historical case studies to assist students to have greater worldly awareness about instances of genocide and persecution, and to make informed and conscientious choices in all their interactions in the present.

This immigration unit raises questions about American identity, and examines the tension between race, democracy, and citizenship. Students are encouraged to face their own prejudices while considering reasons that the Chinese and other immigrants have met resistance from many Americans. The questions are also a tool to help students make connections to the current debates and issues surrounding immigration today.

Photograph of Chinese American men and three children in traditional dress in Chinatown, San Francisco, between 1896-1911

I attended two days of Facing History’s immigration workshop and learned a lot from the comments of the teachers in attendance. Many wished to better serve their diverse student populations by offering broader narratives beyond the Ellis Island paradigms that focus predominantly on white immigrants. Others commented that they felt a responsibility to focus more on immigration history in response to a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, especially towards Hispanic and Muslim immigrants, in the past few years.

Cover of Facing History and Ourselves’ educator’s guide to the documentary film Becoming American: The Chinese Experience

This workshop also revealed that Asian Americans have been hugely underrepresented in history lessons and popular culture. Many of the teachers at the workshop appeared dismayed that there was so much of the Chinese immigrant experience they did not know. This is perfect evidence that many of us adults received a homogenous immigration narrative, if any, while we were in secondary school. Now it is the responsibility of teachers and immigration public historians to make sure this does not persist.

As Dan-el Pedia Peralta, a professor at Princeton and Dominican immigrant wrote in a 2016 op-ed, “My hopes for immigration reform lie with the young. Their education is what’s next for reform, since the urgency of teaching about the immigration experience has rarely been so acute as it is now.” I would add that public historians also have a role to play in teaching about immigration outside of the schools. Both teachers and public historians have a lot to gain from Facing History’s approach to teaching immigration in this moment.

Public History at UMass Boston

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