Posts

Eleventh Post- 2 August 2024

     This will be my final blog post documenting my internship for the Florida Historical Review. I am so pleased to have been able to work on this project and to have been part of such a helpful and enthusiastic little team. I have gained several professional skills from this work, such as time management, communication skills, hands-on experience, and a newfound reverence for not only history as a subject, but for history as a professional practice as well. My time at this internship has taught me about what being a historians means, not only as a vocation but as a concrete career. I think that history is often taught as something very abstract, and in some ways it is; lots of it is done through text and theory, but as my work with the journal has proven, these theories manifest themselves in real changes in the world. History can cause people to change how they think about their surroundings, how they retell their stories, and how they construct their narratives in the future. In th
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Tenth Post- 26 July, 2024

 This week my team and I had our final presentations for the Summer 2024 history internship. We had the privilege of getting to hear from several teams from a diverse range of niches and applications of history, and we were able to share our own work with the rest of the group. I was already familiar with Dr. Gannon's Olustee project from the History and Historians class of hers that I took last semester, so it was interesting to hear how that has been progressing.  The other groups were fascinating as well. One was about the history of Sanford and another was a dive into sixteenth-century English letters. I was pleased and excited to be able to contribute by sharing what I and my peers had learned over the course of our internship. It was also helpful to talk about the trials and tribulations that come with such work; it was reassuring to hear that everyone has learned about and dealt with impostor syndrome, time management, or being afraid to ask questions at some point. Though
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Ninth Post- 19 July 2024

 This week my fellow interns and I got together to work on our final presentation for all the history department internships. They were very helpful and we were all quite pleased with the results of our work. We also had a practice run of the presentation to ensure that we would not go over or under time on the occasion of the actual presentation day. We made sure to answer the two questions accorded to each slide subject as outlined by the rubric. Public speaking (or speaking over zoom for that matter, which will be the format of the final presentation) is not my strong suit, but I am not too worried about the upcoming presentation, since I know the subject matter well and I will have a team with me. I just need to take care not to speak too fast or take too much time looking for the proper word to say. As the internship is drawing to a close, I feel I can begin to look back on my work leading up to this point. I have certainly encountered many fascinating subjects I would not have ot
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Eighth Post- 12 July 2024

 This week, I completed my assignment of finding the backgrounds of people involved in the right academic fields who might be qualified to read Dispatches from Beluthahatchee: A Stetson Kennedy Reader . In the foreword alone I was able to find several relevant sources. Curiously, the book does not appear to have an acknowledgements section, which made my job easier. Part of the guidelines for the assignment was that I should not recommend any scholars who had already been acknowledged, since they had already made a contribution and were therefore biased. The introduction section was also very short and did not contain any citations, as it was more of a direct message from the editor of the book. I still read it carefully, however, as it contained useful information about Kennedy's life. While facts about the books subject matter are not directly related to my project, I have found that knowing a subject inside and out makes any adjacent research much easier, as I begin to understan
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Seventh Post- 28 June 2024

This week I and my fellow interns met with Dr. Lester and we received our new books. I confirmed that my previous assignment was finished and that my notes would be sent to the author. We had many books to choose from, but I ended up selecting the Stetson Kennedy Reader. I was not familiar with Kennedy's work until discovering this book, and I have found it very interesting. Our goal with this assignment is to review the preface or foreword, take special note of any footnotes and/or acknowledgements, and to document them. Then, based on that information, we need to research academics in the field of study being written about and gather information about them and their work. Mine might be tricky, as it deals with such a niche topic (the work of one man), but I hope to be able to find specialists on Florida anthropology and activism in the mid twentieth century, who, I predict, will undoubtedly have at some point encountered Stetson Kennedy's work. Hopefully all these people have
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Sixth Post- 21 June 2024

 I have officially submitted my reviewed and copy edited article. I am still getting prepared for my second assignment, but I feel that I am ready for whatever that may be. Last week my post was submitted late, which was an oversight on my part, but I am back on schedule and I will try to be much more punctual in the future. I submitted my mid-term evaluation to Dr. Lester, and the publishing of this blog post will mark my halfway point through the Florida Historical Review internship. As I approach the second semester of the summer, I feel that I have a gotten a more firm grasp on what the internship entails, and my goal is to increase my productivity as I move forward. I also plan to begin work on my final project presentation. I will also be taking another class next semester, as I did this semester, so I should be in a similar situation to how I am now and have been for the first half of the summer. I do not mind this, since the first semester I found my situation to be manageable.
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Fifth Post- 17 June 2024

This week I completed my copy editing for my article and sent it to Dr. Lester. I tried to keep all critiques and edits appropriate to my position as an editor and reviewer and I think that I did that successfully. Once again the reviewers met with Dr. Lester in her office and we touched base with one another. I got to hear about what other kinds of new projects my peers were working on, which was very interesting. My laptop was giving me serious trouble this week, so my access to Word, which I have been using to review the article, was restricted temporarily, but I think this has been resolved for good. Another issue I ran into was that I was unable to find the images Dr. Lester sent me to add to the article. I knew they were in an email somewhere, but I could not find them for the life of me, so I wrote “Image” as a placeholder in all the places where I would have put the image. Of course, after having sent her the finished document,
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