Stephanie Matos Ayala was accepted into Purdue University’s doctoral history program. Her area of focus will be Early Modern England and she plans to examine England’s diplomatic relationship with Spain during the Tudor period.
Congratulations Stephanie! We wish you the best.
Second year graduate student Josh McConnell and his work as an intern at the Altoona Public Library was recently featured in the Altoona Mirror.
HIST 504: Medieval Europe I, 1000-1350
HIST 505: Renaissance and Reformation
HIST 522: French Revolution and Napoleon
HIST 530: History of Islamic Civilization
HIST 540: Colonial America
HIST 543: Civil War and Reconstruction
HIST 550: History of Latin America, Colonial Period
HIST 563: Thought and Culture in Early America
HIST 601: History Seminar
HIST 605: Introduction to Public History
HIST 770: Archival Principles and Practices
Course offerings for the Spring 2013 semester are:
HIST 502: History of Ancient Rome
HIST 503: Medieval Europe I, 400-1000
HIST 526: History of Russia
HIST 541: The American Revolution
HIST 551: History of Latin America in the National Period
HIST 565: History of Black America Since Emancipation
HIST 569: Women in America
HIST 581: Special Topic in History
HIST 591: Film as History
HIST 601: History Seminar
HIST 606: Topics in Public History – Museum Studies
Congratulations to our Fall 2012 graduates:
Douglas Edwards
Jeremy Gardner
Ashley Metzger
Kensee Roberts
We wish you success!
Altoona Public Library: Joshua McConnell
This fall semester I volunteered as an intern at the Jimmy Stewart Museum in Indiana, Pennsylvania. This experience provided me with the opportunity to survey over 1500 items in the Museum’s collection and in doing so I created a digital catalog of all the items. Prior to the creation of this digital catalog, the collection was in a chaotic state, but the collection can now be verified and stored to best suit the Museum’s needs. The process of creating this catalog allowed me to explore the life of Jimmy Stewart. The items in the collection range from his early childhood experiences at Mercersburg and the Stewart Hardware store to Jimmy Stewart’s film experiences and military service in the Army Air Corps. Not many people are aware that Jimmy Stewart remained a reservist in the military after his service in World War II and retired a Major General.
There were many interesting and fascinating items in the collection which varied greatly from personal correspondence with President Ronald Reagan to a more public sphere which included citations and awards from his acting career. The collection of the Jimmy Stewart Museum included items donated by the Stewart family and by friends and fans. This variety creates a magnitude and diversity of items within the collection.
Not all of my time was spent surveying and creating this digital catalog. I also spent time assisting the museum with tours. To my surprise, the majority of museum visitors were not locals, but guests who traveled to see to the museum. The experience of assisting with the tours reminds you about the benefits of working in the sphere of public history because you can see the enjoyment and fulfillment that guests have by experiencing such galleries. These galleries are meant to help guests explore the life experiences of Jimmy Stewart and also provide an avenue for them to travel into their own past. When giving tours, I heard “remember when…” and “that was that time that we…” and these moments make these experiences all the more memorable.
Each year the Jimmy Stewart Museum holds a theatrical performance as a fundraiser which also works as a means to bring together the community. I assisted Museum Director Tim Harley in organizing and carrying out several duties that helped bring together the performance of Rich Little’s “Jimmy Stewart and Friends.” The performance took place at the Kovalchuk Center and with the help of many volunteers, including myself, the performance ended up selling out. It was a great experience for me and for the public. It was great being able to experience the fulfillment the public received from the performance and it showed the sense of community they had from reminiscing about the life of a local hero. The internship at the Jimmy Stewart Museum helped and allowed me to gain crucial experience in the field of Public History but more importantly raised my awareness of the crucial importance that history has on the local level.
Paul Davis recounts his fall 2012 internship experience:
I interned at the Indiana County Historical Society in Indiana Pa. Because of the experience I have gained I left the society feeling very good about my future. I did a variety of jobs while working there and I did that by design. The Historical Society performs a number of functions relating to history and I wanted to gain as much experience as I could. I assisted many people in their research pursuits and in turn I learned the ins and outs of library administration. I gained valuable museum work experience in a variety of ways, such as composing exhibit text. I expanded my computer skills by creating catalog entries for their artifact database, as well as worked in member services in maintaining information in the membership database. I also did many non-history related jobs that are essential to keeping a small Historical Society like that afloat, like building shelves for artifacts and general cleaning duties. I did so many jobs in one given week that it is impossible to truly describe in detail all that I did during my time there. In the end I feel that the variety that I strove for has paid off. I am grateful for my time working there and I know the experience that I have gained will be invaluable to me in the future.
Paul Davis: Indiana County Historical Society
John Mortimer: Jimmy Stewart Museum
Douglas recounts his experience at the CLA:
I spent this summer interning at the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives and Records administration in Washington, DC. I was an archival intern there, where I assisted in the day to day operations of the center, and got to learn a little bit about each of the functions archivists perform there.
I worked on a processing project, involving papers that the archives had received from Joe Biden’s office when he became vice president that had not been touched since they were given to the archives. I was given the freedom to arrange the records as I saw fit and then re-house them, with minimal preservation work where necessary. The collection was 110 boxes long, and I was unfortunately unable to finish what I started, but the organization scheme I came up with and began to implement is the one they will be using for those records, which is pretty awesome.
I also got to work with researchers who came in and assisted with reference requests. This involved learning NARA’s accession and organizational system. This task seemed daunting at first, yet by the end of the internship I felt like I could tell you where any given Congress could be found within a few rows, which was an amazing feeling. Assisting in this knowledge was also likely my work on a finding aid creation project, where we sought to collate existing description and perform original description where needed of records we held to put in digital finding aids. As things currently stand, all a prospective researcher can tell from their records are if we have records for a given Congress or committee, especially for earlier records. This project should increase the organizations ability to serve researchers greatly and I am proud to have worked on it.
Perhaps the coolest thing about working there, is that I was literally working in a national landmark, with a very cool museum in it and I got to see a lot of the records held in the so-called “treasure vault” where they store anything that is particularly valuable or historically important, including the records of the first 14 Congresses, the first issue of Mad magazine and a petition protesting a tax on whiskey from little known distiller Andrew Jackson. On my final week working there, I was tasked with performing basic description on about 40 drawers of unorganized oversized Senate documents, where I found a new treasure for the vault, the electoral vote tally sheet from the election of 1796, the first peaceful transfer of power in our nation’s history. That moment crystallized how I felt about my work there – I felt like I made a difference and got to actually leave an impact on our nations record-keeping and it was just a very cool experience. I hope to one day work there for real, here’s hoping.
