February 18, 2013
My
internship at the +Florida Historical Society in Cocoa, Florida,
entails that I familiarize myself with a collection in the archive,
categorize all outside documents that may belong to that collection,
write a new finding guide with the added documents, and then use a
computer program called PastPerfect to present the fully organized
collection through the organization's online databases. The title for
my internship is “archiving assistant,” but I feel as though I
might as well be doing the work of an actual archivist.
The
collection that I am working on is the Federal Writers' Project
papers on the state of Florida. The Federal Writers' Project was a
part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal Program
established in April 1935 as a way of finding jobs for the unemployed
during the Great Depression. The goal of the FWP was to write and
compile extensive collections of local and oral histories,
ethnographies, children's books, and field guides. At the same time,
the FWP created jobs for historians, researchers, writers, editors,
archaeologists, geologists, and cartographers.
From a
historian's standpoint, there are two ways to approach the
collection: as a collection of primary sources or one of secondary
sources. A primary source is original material from the past. A
secondary source is material building upon a primary source. The FWP
papers on Florida are ideal primary sources for late Depression-era
American views on Florida history. As secondary sources, the writings
are decent; I would recommend them first as primary sources for
Depression-era American views on Floridian history before I recommend
them as secondary sources for events like the Seminole Wars or the
Spanish-American War. Every now and then, however, I find transcripts
of interesting first hand accounts buried in some folder. It
certainly is an important collection, covering most aspects of
Florida and its history.
In
reflecting on what I have learned, I am overwhelmed with happiness.
In the last several weeks I have learned how a research library
functions, like the dynamics between the various jobs in the building
and the importance of taking notes (and notes on notes), among other
things. I have learned about aspects of Florida and Cuba's history I
have never known about, which helps to supplement my focus on Cold
War Florida and Cuba. In relation to my classes, the experience has
increased my understanding of how the information taught came to be.
There is also the aspect of selecting documents for archiving and/or
for highlighting, as well as the process of predicting what
researchers and the public may want to look for.
More
importantly, working alongside other individuals who care about
history reminds me of the tentative nature of what we call history,
those “real” stories that individuals and nations use to define
their characters. As far as I can tell, those working alongside me
care about the truth in the documents, but finding that truth can be
an ordeal. The subjectivity of human nature and the circumstances
pressing upon it are too evident when I pore through Florida's
history according to Americans in the 1930s. I knew about the
relativity involved in history when I first signed up for the
internship, but to see it and to make sense of it has been
enlightening.
Until next time,
JCS
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