Week 2:
A Difficult Week for the Better

June 8, 2021

New and Old Projects

This week I spent more time working on some new projects, and continued with what I had started last week. A new project I started with another intern was working on creating educational lessons for kids. I am definitely excited for this, as I am more interested in the educational side of things. I continued researching for the upcoming exhibit, and continued to work on the new display. This included writing a pretty short description to include as a part of the display. I struggled a bit with this since the style is a bit different then I am usually used to writing for school. Of course, this is all meant to be a learning experience since this is all new to me. The feedback for this was much appreciated to be able to head in the right direction. 

Confronting Painful History

My day in person was spent mostly cataloguing archival items that had been donated to the museum. It was fascinating to see and handle all these little pieces of history. Some of these were blatantly racist in nature from early American history. For one, it was startling to think about how short American history is. De Jure segregation was only outlawed 57 years ago. Relatively America’s history is shockingly short and African Americans and other people of color had been legally segregated against during most of it. Even still, in the current time systemic racism persists. I found it a bit difficult (as it should be) to see all these horrible little items of the past. This combined with the fact that I have been researching some equally horrible history, I was struggling a bit this week. Of course, this is all difficult to learn but that is exactly why this history cannot be forgotten. As difficult as it is to learn, it was way more difficult for the people who actually had to go through this. 

The Art of Restoration

When I was in person, I also sat in on a phone conversation about restoring a sign to prepare it for storage in the archives. It was an item that had been donated and damaged from being improperly stored and was in need of restoration. It was interesting how many things there were to think about. This was a bit of a difficult project so we were collaborating with another professional to figure out how to fix it. It was interesting to see this process with someone else, but also made me realize how important it really was to properly store these items to ensure that they can be passed down for future historians, so that this doesn’t happen. 

Looking Forward

This was, honestly, a pretty difficult week. I felt really drained at one point just from having to see and read about so many horrible things. I had to really remind myself of what the point was of learning all this. And that ultimately, it is contributing to more good within the museum. I am also getting a realistic idea about what working in this field professionally would really be like. It will not be easy, and I will encounter a lot of uncomfortable and difficult things.