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...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since my last post before spring break, I have been continuing to work on editing my assigned biography for the rest of the semester's task. I have worked through most of the content within the biography, and this editing is mostly concerned with rewriting certain historical narratives that the original student mentioned, but may not have fully elaborated on. This has mostly been within the "Military Service" section of the biography, because previously, the "Early Life" section had been worked on by a graduate student, so I did not need to edit that section much. In my editing of the "Military Service" section, however, I had run into a slight bump in the road.  In this section, there was a brief note from either a graduate student or Dr. Lyons (we could not figure out for sure who wrote it since it has been a long time since the semester it was writt...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week is the same as the past two weeks (including spring break): working on our narrative text for the gallery cases! The other two undergraduate interns and I have been researching and writing our selected narrative themes/sections, and everything is looking great! We each chose five themes/narratives to work on, and I chose the three main introductory panels for the exhibit's overall purpose and background, and the first two themed panels for the Bicentennial in Florida in 1976. I have had a lot of fun going the research for these sections, especially the panel for Disney World's "America on Parade" that went on from 1975-1976 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the United States' adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The parade featured distinct "American" characters, such as pilgrims and suffragettes, to showcase the "people who bui...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: Since last week, I have been working on editing the biography that I am picking up from last semester's assignment. So far, a lot of the work has been re-familiarizing myself with the content of the narrative and the sources that I have available from the original student's work from the course. As I mentioned last week, much of the story has already been looked over and edited by a previous graduate student, so the "Early Life" section barely needed any editing, and mostly consisted of me resolving comments on the document thread.  I am currently half-way through the "Military Service" section of the biography, which needs the most editing so far. Much of this has been rewriting rather than slight edits to the language or structure of the biography. Much of the information is either not cited well enough to track where the student got it from, or not quite co...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: We have been working on our digital component proposal and timeline since last week. The proposal and timeline were due on Friday (3/13) at 12pm, but we turned it in the day before! Our proposal introduced our method for the digital component which we chose to be a Canva twin of the physical exhibit. In our proposal, we explained why Canva was the best option for our digital exhibit (i.e. the department already has an account, it is simple to navigate, better accessibility etc.) and we also included a mock-up of what the Canva exhibit would look like and a proposed timeline for the creation process.  At first, our proposal for the digital component was going to be a Prezi digital exhibit. We originally chose this because it offered a more interactive feature to the digital component since Prezi allows the viewer to move around freely in the presentation without it needing to be lin...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week saw our first major deadline in the project: the gallery space floor plan! Since last week, we have been working to finalize our object list and create our floor plan for the physical space that the exhibit will be displayed in. After finalizing the object list, I created the floor plan in Procreate (on my iPad), which was modeled after the current 4th Floor Gallery space in the UCF library. During our team's tour of the gallery space a few weeks ago, we decided that the current floor plan in that space would nicely fit our exhibit and there would be no need to alter it from what it already is. The current gallery space has a great flow throughout the cases' positions, and it allows space for any accessibility needs like wheelchairs, crutches, canes, etc. The floor plan I created also included a key that detailed each label on the exhibit floor plan cases. To accompan...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week officially began our next phase for this semester's assignments: biography editing! As my previous post mentioned, last we have each chosen a biography from a previous semester to edit for publishing by the end of the semester. I will be continuing to edit the biography that I started editing last semester before we were assigned to the packets. In our meeting, we discussed our progress with the biographies that we chose in a previous meeting this semester, and how we were going to approach them this semester. The biography I had chosen to edit last semester is in better shape than others in terms of bulk editing because I had work on it last semester, but also because a graduate student had previously worked on it as well. This means that I will hopefully be able to get the editing done quickly and efficiently since the Early Life section has been edited before I was assig...

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...