Samantha Froemming's History Blog

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week has been largely focused on finishing the editing process for the Stafford Rimes' biography! I have been working to insert the missing information about his "Military Service" section, which I have been able to do because of historian Samuel de Korte's book on the 452nd AAA unit that Stafford served in.  Like last week's update, I have been mostly reading through chapters 3 and 4 of the book to make sure I have the correct and relevant information about the unit to insert into the biography. A lot of the information in the research has to do with specific instances of movement within the unit and its separate Batteries throughout France and into Germany, so most of my focus was discerning what parts were important to include vs. what we did not necessarily need to include in the biography. I determined most of the broader movements and developments with ...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This was the last official week of the spring internships, which was very bittersweet! I have enjoyed working on this project so much, and I have learned more than I could have ever imagined before starting this internship. Since my last update, the team turned in our final deadline materials! This included our revised narrative text, object label draft designs, and narrative text design drafts. Our revisions on the narrative text may not end up being the finalized version that will accompany the displays in the gallery space, but we worked to revise the text as much as we could before the end of the internship period for the spring semester. There are opportunities for students (including our semester's team) to volunteer over the summer to continue to work setting up the gallery space for the exhibit's opening, so I am assuming that is how the rest of the materials will be ...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since my last update, I have been largely focusing on editing the rest of the Stafford Rimes biography, which I have been given after it was edited by the project supervisor. My task is to fill in any gaps in information that I had originally when writing it in the fall 2024 semester. To do this I am using the book that was written by historian Samuel de Korte, who we connected with last year as a result of the project in HIS4150.  The work to insert the missing information is not difficult, however I have mostly focused on reading the parts of the book that I will need to fill in this information instead of immediately inserting the information without understanding what I am writing about. Much of the information that we are missing from the biography comes from the "Military Service" section, because of the lack of sources or information available about the 452nd Anti-Aircra...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week has been a whirlwind! There has been a lot of moving parts to this week's progress on the Bicentennial Exhibit, and the semester's end is quickly approaching at the same time! Since my last update, the team, graduate supervisor, and project supervisor have worked out that our idea for the Archive session to create the object labels will not be necessary. This is because the object labels can be much simpler than what we originally thought, which is great for our time limit for the rest of the internship! I had a meeting with the graduate supervisor, and we figured out an easier way to create the labels since we will not have the objects directly in front of us when we make them. For now, we will simply use the title of the objects from the object list we made earlier in the semester, and we will not need to include descriptions. On top of this, we also came to the con...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: After my post last week, I sent the biography I was tasked with working on to the project manager to review, and I began to review the biography I had originally wrote in HIS4150 in fall 2024. The previous edits mostly filled in some gaps and clarified some sections from my original work, and now it is time for me to fill in the information that we gained after the project was completed that semester. To do this, I picked up a book from Dr. Lyons on Tuesday that was published by a historian named Samuel de Korte. When I was a student in HIS4150, I found the book randomly one day online before it was published, and we connected with the author, who then was able to include Stafford (the veteran I researched) and his photo into his monograph. I am now able to use this source in our biography to fill in gaps regarding the unit he served in, which was the 452nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automa...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week has been focused on editing the narrative text and beginning our design of the Canva object label templates in preparation for our session in the Archive and Dr. Crepeau's office collection. Communication about the schedule for the workshop session has been delayed, but hopefully we will receive confirmation for next Wednesday (4/15) so that the team can get the labels drafted before our deadline.  Because of delays in communication, we have decided to extend the deadline for the object labels to April 24, which allows us more time to make sure the labels are completed and in good shape for the end of the project before it is set up in the gallery space. I have been in communication with the other undergraduate interns about this, and in the meantime we will be drafting the template for the object labels in Canva. The deadline for next week will be the template instead of...

 H ello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since my last update, I have made great progress on editing the biography I have been tasked with! This week, I worked on finishing up the sections I had left to edit, which included the section I discussed in last week's blog post regarding the sudden appearance of Melun, France in the narrative. I implemented the suggestions that Dr. Lyons spoke to me about in our last team meeting, and I think it flows nicely with the rest of that section's narrative.  After finishing that section, I moved on to the "Legacy" portion of the biography, which usually discusses the soldier's unit after their death, any family legacy associated, and other larger historical themes or events related to the soldier. For this specific biography, there was a need to add in some more "bulk" to the "Legacy" section because of the soldier's identity as an African Ame...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: Since turning in our narrative text draft last week, the team has been waiting for our first round of feedback for future editing on the gallery narratives. In the meantime, we are working to find a day and time to get the whole team together to draft the object labels, which are due on April 17.  We have hit a bit of a roadblock in trying to figure out a day to plan this drafting session, because of everyone's normal schedules and also how hectic the end of the semester gets for everyone involved. I have been in constant communication with the graduate project supervisor to try to figure out a day, however we have not made much progress in this regard. My initial idea was for the team to be able to go back into the Special Collections and University Archives and pull out the specific objects that we decided on back in February with our object list, and to plug them into a Canva te...