I participated in American Public Square’s Evening Social. It was a chance to present their new home to their current members with an appreciation social hour. APS and I put together a venue that showed appreciation with free snacks and drinks. I was a helping hand to whatever Adam, Claire and Alana needed that night. It was a mix of preparation of the dining hall for the guests, pouring drinks for the guests, and cleaning up the venue afterwards. I was able to put faces to names I recognized on paper. It was nice to see and talk with the long standing members of APS. Many members were interested in my story and what my journey was all about. It was quite surprising actually! It was also interesting to see the APS work in action! This wasn’t just a thank you social hour but to remind them that there is so much more to accomplish within this non-profit organization. Claire and Adam really show how a small non-profit organization is really run by getting out in the community and keeping your organization’s name in the rotation. That is what I learned from this late night work event! Cheers to that!

I am wrapping up my final weeks at APS, there were a few computer issues when APS moved and had to wait a few days to get up and running again to speedily recover lost time on their APS HISTORY PROJECT that I am hopeful to present to them as a gift before I leave by July 31st! It has been a great and interesting internship that I definitely needed to see what else was out there in the community.

Until next week. Feverishly typing and arranging my project! See the post below about the social that took place for their members

This week at American Public Square, I have been working on two different projects. I have previously mentioned both projects in prior posts. I have been working on American Public Square’s next forum. As mentioned, the APS team has requested me to work on gathering potential #metoo panelists and their biographical data to present on July 8th. I have dove into the realm of the #Me Too Movement and trying to find panelists from both sides has become tricky without getting into muddy waters. Meaning, I have found myself buried within the conservative realm and experienced a darker side in which I have had to steer clear from. I envisioned the traumatic event that took place at UMKC a few months back and do not want anything like this to happen. I am really looking towards scholars and mental health professionals to guide the panel. Without giving any information away about the potential panelists, I came up with eight supportive #me too panelists and five conservative panelists. I provided a small biographical survey of the panelist, whether it they worked as a scholar or they worked directly in the mental health industry. I also provided an image clip of each potential panelist as well. I have finally completed the list and it appears to be quite diverse and fulfills audience expectation for the forum.

The APS History Project was put on the shelve last week, so it was a little discombobulated. However, I finally got the project reorganized once again and back on top of it! All hard copies are in a binder now and sectioned accordingly. The APS has retreated in their own projects, so I do have the extra time right now to spend arranging the company’s old brand of the ‘Village Square’ and mold it into their story of today. This will be the setting of this project. Also, I will make some sort of pamphlet or booklet for APS representatives to be able to present to their clients in the near future. People just do not recognize the APS label and while I am here, we are trying to change this this.

On a side note, this past week, I have helped Claire, the Executive Director of APS reignite their social media platforms and added new ones as well to keep up with a younger generation.

Next week, I will hopefully have a plan set of how the APS History booklet or pamphlet should look because I am suppose to meet with the APS design team this Friday. So, I can move more rapidly after knowing how it will it will be built and how far I can take it. APS is still moving as well, so that is another obstacle that their team is facing and I am really not sure what is happening but I am just taking it one day at a time.

Week #2 was a mixed bag of projects and office duties that consumed the 20 hours last week. The team leaders at APS wanted to make sure that my time at their facility meets the standard for the Public History program and we came up with ideas of how to fulfill this by completing a research project on APS itself. Their ultimate goal by the end of my internship is to have a collection of their history put together in a logical order of its existence. I was happy to take on this project for the familiarity of past research projects completed within the Public History program so far. In between smaller projects that APS found they needed assistance on, I dug through American Public Square’s archived(mostly boxed in closet & not organized in any fashion) materials. It ended up taking most of the week to sort through the material and organize it to its group. There were numerous duplicated materials on hand and made it harder to verify but at the end of the week I narrowed down the material that WAS NOT needed and grouped other materials by issue or event. I am currently taking a break from this to assist on another project that will consist of researching panelists.

I was asked to complete another small project that needed organization for the Executive Director, Claire last week. For this project, I assisted Claire in re-organizing APS’s Receipt Logs for 2019. Apparently the logs were underwhelming disorganized and Claire felt it needed attention asap. What I did to assist, was break down the file into 3 sections for her, which, for her, made more sense. Paid receipts, Receipts paid, and Merchandise Receipts. I attached all banking correspondence to each transaction and put the logs in descending order. The file was returned to Claire in a new organized fashion that will help her now.

Last week i was also asked to start researching panelists or the upcoming APS forum on the #Metoo campaign. For this, I felt that I needed to educated myself on some of the leading activists and the #Metoo founder’s message / become familiar with their website to find current issues/talks, etc…. And I needed to start thinking about the panelists who I wanted to share as a more of conservative stance. For me, this is a bit hard because I know where my beliefs lie and its hard to be in the middle….so I need to present my picks with activist/bio detail by July 8th. I know I want to pick Tarana Burke, the founder of the #Metoo movement. I know she is willingly to come to speak in this area, she has does this in the past in Kansas State University.

For the #Metoo movement and the for the conservative panelists, I plan to look for local panelist first and turn to websites, twitter, blogs, newspaper articles for contacts and ideas. (the #metoo website has been really helpful–their site links to a persons demographic area and links to resources, etc…..)

So most of these projects are continuous projects, so stay tuned.

To tell the truth, I had no idea who APS was either when I first approached the idea of interning for their entity. APS is a non-profit organization who brings together non-like minded people for fact based, civil conversations about national, regional, and local issues. Their offices are based right here in the heart of Kansas City. It is a small organization that branched out on its own and is continually growing.

After a few discussions with the staff and UMKC mentor, my internship will consist of putting APS back onto the map. APS has been underrepresented and for my major project, I will collect and refocus the HISTORY of APS. Secondly, I will help APS find ways to get their name out into the community with more use of their media connections–whether it comes from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or restart their APS PODcast (which I feel could bring a larger audience to the table). Lastly, I will contribute with day-to-day office duties that require extra set of hands when needed.

I have already begun acquainting myself with APS and their operations this week and jumping into the History of APS project.

There is a lot of reorganizing and thinking of how I plan to build this to their standard. It is a standard that adheres to the community, donors, activists, and organizers.

To begin and not get overwhelmed, I just began to separate the material by topics, events, years, etc, This seems to be speeding the process up.

APS is also moving next week, so these extra hands will come in handy. SO, my project will probably not get as many hours as i like but we will see. So far, I have spent roughly 15 hrs.

Henry Johnson

During my summer Internship at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, our primary focus as Interns has been to rework lesson plans about World War I so they are ready to be used as teacher resources. I have learned that this is an in-depth process. While working on lesson plans, I found myself googling and regoogling things such as copyright laws and how they apply to everything from old newspapers to images. I became familiar with the Museum and Memorials collection of propaganda posters like they were my old friends. Some lesson plans needed only a couple citations fixed, others needed complete reformatting and writing.

It was the subject matter in these lesson plans that not only kept me searching for the missing information, but would captivate me with what I would find. The lesson plan that I enjoyed working on the most was about war hero Henry Johnson and the battles he faced coming home from the service. Henry Johnson was a soldier from the African American division called the  “Harlem Hellrattlers” in World War 1. One day him and his buddy Needham Roberts were on watch duty when a surprise attack of twelve German soldiers appeared. Henry and Needham’s guns jammed and so they had to fight off the twelve soldiers using only knives. In the lesson plan, students are told to examine newspaper articles from the time and look at how the media presented Henry Johnson when he arrived home in 1919. They are told to compare accounts from before and after Henry Johnson gave his controversial lectures to the public. Looking at how these lectures affected the public’s opinion of him. While researching it, I found Military Intelligence reports on Johnson detailing how he was dangerous because he was said things that were not “patriotic” the government; a government that had segregated him even in the military. This is example of one perspective of him that students would look be told to analyze.

Lesson plans like this work to help students understand how and why we are where we are today. Because of this I felt excited to play my part in helping this story come alive to students through the primary source documents I carefully collected.

photo courtesy of wikicommons.

My name is Michael Spachek and I have been working with the Jackson County Historical Society this summer as they process the Wilborn Negative Collection and with the Alexander Majors as a Collections and Research Intern.

JCHS Wilborn Negative Collection Archive

The collection contains an estimated 500,000 historic images of Kansas City from the early 1900s to 2006. My main responsibility is to organize the collection into a system that meets archival standards and will be more user friendly in the future. Eventfully, the Wilborn Collection will be digitized and made available to the public online by Missouri’s bicentennial in 2021. I have been involved with similar photographic collections in the past, but nothing this large.

So far, the most challenging part of the internship has been the size of the collection. Before I began, I thought I had a good understanding of how to process photo negative collections. Unsurprisingly, I was wrong. That hubris formed the bases for the most important lesson of the summer. In my previous experience, I did not feel like I had to be as rigorous in my processing and I made plenty of mistakes because of it. Part of that was, as an undergraduate, not knowing any better but it was also working with small collections where mistakes were easy to fix. The second I saw the boxes where the collection is held, I knew I had to become much more detailed in my approach to processing. Thanks to the help of the Jackson County staff, I have done just that. They taught me the proper way to put a collection into an organized system of box and file numbers and how to describe each file. I have learned to double check each box as I complete it to make sure the files are in order. Needless to say, I am much better prepared for a career in public history now then I was a few short weeks ago.

Alexander Majors Barn – Collections & Research Internship

In addition to the Jackson County Historical Society, I am also interning for the Alexander Majors House Museum this summer. For this internship, I am processing their collection of blacksmithing tools and creating an exhibit that is focused on blacksmithing in the 19^th century and the role of skilled slave labor on the Majors property in the 1850s. The first step was separating the blacksmithing tools from the random assortment of other objects. Right now, I am beginning to research the individual tools to determine if they fall into the Museums timeframe of the 1850s to the 1880s. The final product will be an interpretive space that educates the public on this topic.

The Museum has a wide variety of visitors and the exhibit will need to be appropriate for all ages. That has challenged me to really think about how to interpret very serious topics like slavery for children and adults. I am not quite sure how I will do that yet but the process has been enlightening. However, that is not the only the challenge of this internship. I have very little blacksmithing knowledge so it has been a test of my research skills to learn about these objects.

This has been a very educational experience for me because it has combined all aspects of research, collections management, and interpretation into one project. I have worked on exhibits in the past where I was responsible for just the research or just the interpretation but I have never been solely responsible for the entire project. It is intimidating knowing that I have no one to blame but myself if the project does not meet my standards. By having control of all aspects of the exhibit, it has forced me to grow as a public historian and an educator. I am looking forward to the completion of this project and the knowledge that I have what it takes to make it as a professional historian.