Samantha Froemming's History Blog

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: First, I wish to discuss my experience in the role of "team lead" for the undergraduate interns, and my process of learning how to be in this role:  I am so grateful to have been given an opportunity to be a team lead for the interns, but it has not come without a learning curve! Before this internship, I had never really been put in a position (officially, at least) where I am "in charge" of other people. Usually in my academic life, I tend to take on this type of role naturally in group settings because of my passion for learning and my want to do things the best I can. This means that in group projects, I tend to take on a "project manager" type of role, which has always been great for me. This internship has allowed me to really learn and experience this in a new way, which has been amazing.  The times I struggle in this internship, and specifically in...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Compared to the previous weeks, this week has been the least busy so far this semester. Because the primary source packets were needed for Dr. Lyons' EUH-3451 course this week, we did not need to continue to edit the packets we were previously working on. This meant that we also did not need to hold a meeting this week, since our first major deadline of the semester had been met! Dr. Lyons assigned each student in the course one soldier to work on, and now it is their task to construct a podcast episode on the soldier's life, which will follow the structure and content from the primary source packets.  I look forward to hearing how the project's introduction went over with the undergraduate course, and I am excited to see what the students create within the project's guidelines! From messages in our project team thread, I saw that one of the students may have had some beg...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week had some great experiences/developments! First, I will discuss the field trip that the Public History Central team went on: On Wednesday, we had our field trip to visit the Orange County Regional History Center! When we first arrived, we were introduced to two employees within two different departments at the History Center, which included someone who worked in collections, and someone who worked in public programming. They each spoke about their paths to finding their positions at the History Center, and they gave us valuable insight into this field of work. The positions are very different from each other, but they overlap in some ways. Working in collections includes, of course, working to house and acquire items for the collection, which includes physical artifacts and materials, but also other not-so-physical things like conducting oral histories for the collection...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: The packets are almost ready! I have been continuing to edit the Primary Source Packets I was assigned to complete for Dr. Lyons' EUH-3451 course. The packets need to be completed by February 24, which is when the project will be presented to the class for their assignment, which is coming up quick!  This week, like the last few, has been focused solely on completing these packets, and finally it is seeming like there is a light at the end of this packet-tunnel. We need a total of 12 packets to be edited and ready for the students to use to create their podcast episodes, and currently there are 10 in our "ready to use" folder. This is amazing progress! It is so very rewarding to see our hard work come together for the class, I am so happy we are almost ready for the students to use them.  These packets have incredible stories within them, and they will become great materi...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week saw great progress for the project's development! On Wednesday, we (the team) were able to go into the University Archives and Special Collections to view Dr. Crepeau's items housed at the Library. This collection includes different items from the collection housed in his office in Trevor Colbourn Hall, and we will be using both collections to build our exhibit. In the archived collection, there are many items related specifically to Florida and the Bicentennial, such as Disney socks, a telephone directory book, posters, advertisement booklets, etc. I believe that these items will tie in perfectly with our theme of the Bicentennial on the local level in 1976. We will look at the overarching themes of national Bicentennial as it is unavoidable with the overall narrative, but we will focus on Florida specifically because that is where UCF is and where the collection was...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week (as well as the next few weeks) is entirely focused on finishing the Primary Source Packets for the presentation of the podcast assignment for Dr. Lyons' EUH-3451 course. The assignment presentation will need to be ready by February 24, so our deadline is approaching quickly!  I have worked on six packets so far, and I believe most of them are ready (if not very close) for their final versions. The latest packet that I worked on especially needed a lot of editing from its previous state, so this has taken the majority of my time this week. The packet is a truly heartbreaking story of two brothers who fled Germany in 1938, moved to New York with their family, and were killed in service after being drafted to fight in France. This narrative is so unique to the packets so far, and we are committed to making sure it is polished for whichever student receives it for their assign...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week's update is much more exciting than my previous ones because we have made progress on the exhibit's development! On Tuesday (2/3), we had our first meeting with Dr. Crepeau, who is responsible for the creation of the collection in 1976! Our meeting was to get all of us familiar with Dr. Crepeau, and to walk through ideas about the exhibit, the collection itself, and the overall vision for the development of this project. The meeting was so fun, we got to look through some of the boxes that Dr. Crepeau had in his office, which included all sorts of fun and interesting historical "junk" from the Bicentennial year. Things like cereal boxes, magazines, sugar packets, soda cans, and much much more are part of this collection, and it was so fascinating to see the sheer volume of the collection. I did not realize truly how much stuff Dr. Crepeau had collected with ...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week has been entirely focused on editing the student submission Primary Source Packets for Dr. Lyons' upcoming podcast project in her undergraduate EUH3451 course. We need to have roughly fifteen packets ready by February 14 for the students to use as their guide for the podcast project. I am not sure how many packets we (meaning the graduate assistant, project manager, and myself) have worked on so far, but I believe we have all at least somewhat finished one each. We divided up five packets each to edit, so hopefully we can get through all of them by the deadline we set. I have worked through three of my five packets, although the editing process on those three is not yet completed. The editing process tends to be fairly slow, since there are multiple things that we need to check for and edit, then we have to send them to the project manager and then Dr. Lyons to look over....