Brendan Campbell's History Internship 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...

 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. Th...

 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 hav...

 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...

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...

 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 managea...

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 ...

I have spent the week copy editing my article. Dr. Lester was out in a conference this week, so we did not meet in person. We did, however, check up over email to ensure that things were going well and that I was making progress. I have found that I have settled into the rhythm of the internship quite comfortably. Historically, I have always been someone who works in large chunks of productivity instead of steadily chipping away at big assignments. For this one, however, I feel I have a much better long term grasp on it than I would for an ordinary research paper or copy editing assignment for school. Hopefully this has taught me a long-term lesson about professionalism and time management, one which I have been learning very slowly for several years! Reading the article more closely has taught me a great deal about Florida's agricultural history, and about Floridian history in general. The topic my assigned article is covering covers many decades of the 20th century, so every time...

This week I finally began dipping my toes into copy editing the article. I have mostly finished double checking the  syntax of the article's footnotes, though I may have to go back and make more changes later. The author seems to  have not made many mistakes, at least not that I can find. This leads me to worry that maybe I have misunderstood  something about my instructions or maybe I am simply not looking hard enough. I do not have enough prior  experience to be able to anticipate how many errors should normally appear in the footnotes. I plan to double check  with Dr. Lester in order to touch base on these issues.   The process of looking into the origins of these sources was quite fun. Unlike last week, I was actually quite  surprised at how many of these vintage newspapers were available on the UCF library website. Frustratingly, I found  that those that were available online were blocked by a paywall, so the person writing the article must h...

     This week I began reading my assigned article and checking the syntax of its footnotes. The article is very interesting, and I have learned a great deal about the lives of rural women in early 20th century Florida. The subject matter I am covering also spans several critical decades in Floridian and American history, so it is fascinating to be able to see what kind of effects these changes, such as the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II, had on daily life for rural Floridian women. Though much of women's advancement can be attributed to social movements, it is also interesting to learn about the more subtle ways that women worked to gain economic independence.     I have had some trouble with regards to copy editing the article's footnotes. Many of the sources do not seem to be online so I cannot double check them with the UCF library to ensure that they are done correctly. Thankfully, I have the Chicago Manual of Style on hand so that I ...

I’m very excited to be beginning my internship! This is the first of many blog posts I will be making to document my  journey. My name is Brendan Campbell and I’m a history major minoring in literature entering my fourth year at the  University of Central Florida. I discovered the Florida Historical Quarterly internship through my Scholarly Editing  and Publishing course, and I’m thrilled that I did. I have worked on the Cypress Dome as an editor and taken several  history courses. I also contributed to the Samuel Johnson online dictionary transcription project last year.  I have not yet developed a thesis, however I hope the experience I gain from this class might help me to elucidate that process. The areas of history I tend to be most interested in are American history, throughout the centuries but  particularly the 19th and early 20th century, and European history, also in the 19th century. I have taken only one  college course pertaining exclusive...