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 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 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...

 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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....

    Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: To follow-up on my last blog post, I will start by discussing my experience at the Florida Conference of Historians! On Saturday (1/24/26), we presented the Florida France Soldier Stories project in Gainesville at the Florida Conference of Historians, which was a great experience. Our panel began at 1pm, and we presented to a small group of (mostly UCF) other undergraduate students, graduate students, and UCF faculty. Our presentation consisted of a brief overview of the project over its lifetime (about 10 years), an understanding of why and how this work is being done, what the role of graduate and undergraduate students are, the website, and the new partnership with the Colmar Pocket Museum. Each of us had a section where we explained certain aspects of the project, and I was tasked with introducing the new partnership and projects in Dr. Lyons' undergraduate courses. I lo...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project: This week has been (mostly) about preparation for our presentation at the Florida Conference of Historians! We are presenting on Saturday January 24 (tomorrow), so we have all been working to prepare our presentation this week. We had a meeting last Friday to discuss the content that we will share with the audience, as well as who will present what information. We decided that I will introduce the new partnership with the Colmar Pocket Museum in France and the new packet project that we are doing in connection with the Museum. This is great for me, since I have been working on the packet project since it began last semester, so I am very experienced with the information I will be presenting.  On Wednesday, we had our regular FFSS team meeting, which discussed our progress on the packets and presentation that we will need for both of Dr. Lyons' classes. The presentation of the ...

 Hello!  My name is Samantha Froemming, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. For some who may have seen my previous semester's blog posts: I am back for another internship semester with the Florida France Soldier Stories project! For those who may be seeing this for the first time: welcome! This is where I share my progress in my internships at UCF, with weekly updates as required by the course advisor.  I am very excited to continue working on this project, alongside familiar and new people, and I cannot wait to share all of the new and exciting things we will be taking on this semester! To start, I have begun this semester by working to help Dr. Lyons and our senior project manager decide which packets from last semester we will use for a new project in Dr. Lyons' EUH3451 course, as well as updating a presentation slideshow for the continuation of the source packet project in Dr. Lyons' HIS3600 course.  This new project in EUH3451...