Time Hop: Archival Ambassadors (2011)

 

Archival Ambassadors: Class of 2011

The High School Ambassadors have had an exciting week full of document-based activities, Park history, reflective blogging, historical thinking techniques, tours, and scholarly discussion! On Wednesday, the Ambassadors explored Jockey Hollow, where the group learned about hut construction, home life during the Revolutionary period, and the myths surrounding Tempe Wick. This week has been dedicated to primary document investigation, making careful observations, and practicing diligent and responsible scholarship.

We have all made some great new friends along the way!

This fresh batch of Park Stewards is excited to share what they have learned all week with family and friends! See you at Community Day, July 16, 10:00 am!

To follow the Archival Ambassadors blog reflections and to view their fantastic photo galleries, click HERE!

Report 3: Reflecting on the Last Three Weeks

Now that we are wrapping up our third week of the program (and our final week before the students join us), we wanted to take some time to reflect on what we have done thus far and why we have decided to do what we are doing with the students once they are here. Our first week here went by pretty quickly, full of tours that allowed us to learn the background information surrounding the Morristown National Historical Park sites, discussing and brainstorming to figure out topics and themes for both the student week and the Traveling Archives Box, and then looking through the Finding Aid and researching documents that we each found interesting. Once we had had a chance to explore the wide range of sources in the Lloyd W. Smith collection, we brought together our plethora of documents and arranged them under various categories in order to prepare ourselves for the next step: sorting through and selecting what documents we really wanted to use. The narrowing down process was difficult, since there are so many exciting and exhilarating documents in the collection, but we ultimately got down to a manageable sized group (have 3-6 documents per category). Using this group of documents, we were able to flesh out both the plan for the week and the lesson plans for the Box, developing various activities, lectures, and presentations to get the students thinking about both the documents and artifacts and the historical process.

While putting everything together, we realized that our actions and the process we were following would be helpful to share with the students for their future historical work. This became our philosophy behind the week with the students and the lesson plans. We decided we want to teach them not only how to think historically, but also how to be Mini-Historians. We will have each day reflect a particular step in what we see as the process for doing historical work: the first day will be about discovering interests and choosing topics, the second day will be about brainstorming different types of documents and artifacts that can be used while researching and then gathering these sources together, the third day will be about analyzing and interpreting those sources and understanding how a physical space can also be used for historical research, and the fourth and fifth days will be about presenting the work they have done and discussing how places, items, and parks are preserved and what career paths historians can follow. While doing all this, they will also be learning about the important role Morristown and other National Historical Parks play in the community and the extensive collection that is housed at this site.

We also composed a couple of worksheets pertaining to the anatomy of a history paper and tips we wish we had learned in high school about what to do and what not to do when writing a paper. Coupled with the week's activities and lesson plans, we feel these worksheets will be great tools that the students can continue to use throughout their high school and college careers.

We look forward to meeting all the students on Monday and cannot wait to see what their different personalities and interests add to the program! The week with them should be full of many exciting moments of discovery, in regards to not only the documents, artifacts, and sites, but also the historical process and skills associated with it. We are very eager to share everything we've found and learned with them!

Hard at Work

With the high school program just around the corner, the Archival Ambassador interns have been keeping busy.

Interns organize student packets.

group meeting

putting together an activity agenda

Elizabeth and Lauren finalize notes and select manuscripts for next week.

folder preparation

Park Stewards Intern, Stephanie Daugherty, assists the group with participant mailings.

Mentor Teacher, Christina Wallace, gives advice on lesson planning and student activities.

Lauren prepares student activities.

Andrea transcribes a manuscript.

Lauren and Elizabeth prepare to photograph original manuscripts for document activities.

Park Stewards Teaching Fellow, Laurie Schmid, stops in for a visit.

Peter and Lacey examine an original manuscript.

Peter and Lauren conduct a live feed test run in the Ford Mansion.

Lauren organizes potential student workshop topics.

Ranger Thomas Winslow and Teacher-Ranger-Teacher, Steve Santucci, stop by to view a Nathaniel Greene manuscript the Ambassadors will use during the high school program.

The group visits Jockey Hollow to test run the outdoor game plan.
(Wick Orchard pictured).

Elizabeth examines maps on microfilm.

Around the Corner: Community Day

Our High School Archival Ambassadors are joining us July 11-16 for an academic day camp. The program will include working with authentic documents, refining historical thinking skills, touring historical sites, and learning about careers in the field of history among other activities. On Saturday, July 16 they will present their findings!

Join Us!

Archival Ambassadors Go to Jockey Hollow!

At the end of last week we ventured out to Jockey Hollow to flesh out the logistics of the day that we are taking the students there. We went to the Visitor Center, checked out the gardens and Wick House, and then walked the trail to the soldier huts. Along the way, we kept track of time and came up with more activities we can do with the students. We also saw some neat things (like deer and toads) along the trail and became acquainted with nature.

Report 2: Wrapping Up Week Two

We are now wrapping up our second week of the program and are getting things finalized for the week the students come in. Spending most of the week brainstorming our plans for each day and working together to gather documents and supplies, we were able to accomplish a lot. We have written out a tentative schedule (including activities and topics to cover on each day, as well as field trips), mailed a letter out to the students, and put together folders for each student that include various worksheets and resources.

Aside from all the planning for the week, we also each did some more research and went through the documents we have amassed in order to close in on which ones we want to focus on and ensure that all of them are printed out and labeled. We also began transcribing some of the more important documents to be sure that we have a full understanding of what they say and how we can incorporate them. We are planning on further discussing the documents to decide which ones we want to show the students and include in the Traveling Archives Box. In the upcoming days, we will also be building off of our plans for the week to develop the lesson plans for the Box.

Meet the Archival Ambassadors' Mentor Teacher!

Christina Wallace
Hello! My name is Christina Wallace and I am currently a history teacher in Newark, NJ. I have been teaching for eleven years, and this past week I have had the great privilege and honor to serve as a mentor teacher for interns in the Archival Ambassadors program here at Washington's Headquarters Museum. I have taught US History for many years, but being here at the park and museum archives has truly been a treat. I have had an opportunity to examine and analyze several different primary source documents as well as work collaboratively with these amazing interns. For the past five days, my task has been to show them how to write lessons and create activities for the classroom. In addition, I have learned a great deal from them and the museum staff. I have learned that there are thousands of primary source documents, artifacts, maps, paintings, and so much more here in the museum archives. I have had the opportunity to create lesson plans, explore the teacher resources, and engage in many conversations about the importance of primary source documents in the classroom. Sarah, Jude, and myself have been exploring the many possibilities for teachers and students from Newark Public Schools to not only utilize the great museum archives and programs, but also to create new partnerships that foster collaboration on bringing the archives to the classroom in a variety of ways. I am very excited about all of the future opportunities to come. I am also very proud that two of my students will be participating in the Archival Ambassadors program starting July 11th. I know that they will have an amazing and life-changing experience as I have had. Thank you to all the interns and staff, especially Sarah for inviting me to be a part of this program.

Report 1: Greetings from the Archival Ambassadors!

We are now wrapping up our first week working with the Lloyd W. Smith collection to put together a Traveling Archives unit box for high school students as well as a plan for when our students come to join us later on in the program. It has been a very successful week, full of brainstorming, planning, and researching the collection using microfilm and other sources. Together, we were able to come up with an overall theme for our project, focusing on the everyday lives of people (soldiers at rest, women, children, slaves, Indians, etc.) during wars and the behind-the-scenes workings of the military when both at war and peace. We’re interested in not only covering the Revolutionary War era, which is fitting given our location at Morristown, but also other wars overtime and various locations in order to provide a full understanding of colonial life in general.

So far, each of us has been focusing on various subsections of our overall theme in order to gather all the manuscripts and other documents in the collection that we can include in both the unit box and our time with the students. We have all been able to find a variety of interesting things that may end up being useful.

Andrea has been focusing on looking for manuscripts written by soldiers pertaining to any aspect of the workings of war (not including the battles themselves), as well as any letters or memoirs that can shed light on the lives of everyday people during the colonial period. She has also been looking into anything that may illustrate relations with Indians or the role religion played in the colonial period. Through looking through rolls of microfilm, Andrea has been able to find a couple of particularly useful documents, including a return of provisions and stores received for the use of General John Sullivan (who was stationed in Staten Island in 1777). This document is particularly important in understanding the types of goods soldiers would have needed during the war and how much they would have cost.

Peter has been focusing this week on the economic impact of the American Revolution. Because the military had very little money, they needed to borrow from local businesses and farms constantly, and luckily many of those transactions have been documented. Money for guns, powder, clothing, and food were all copiously transcribed by the Continentals, and much can be ascertained from their records. Peter found a very interesting set of transactions by a leading general in Quebec who wrote his accounts in both English and French. His ledger has been interesting not only because of the amount of materials he purchased, but also because we are able to compare his use of two languages side by side.

Elizabeth has been looking for maps and references to transportation. She has also been brainstorming ideas of activities for possible lesson plans to use with the students attending the program, as well as in the Traveling Archives Box. One neat document that Elizabeth has found is a map of Louisiana in French.

Lacey is focusing on various aspects of home life, including the experiences of women, children, indentured servants, and slaves. Since these groups tend to leave little in the way written documents, spaces themselves, such as the Ford Mansion, serve as excellent sources of information for clues as to the experiences of the eighteenth century home. Additionally, objects located in the gallery at the Washington Headquarters Museum, including dishes, clothing, and toys, provide insight into their owners' lives. Lacey has also had some success locating written documents about these subjects, some written by them and some only written about them. Types of sources she has found, and continues to search for, include family papers, personal letters, calling cards, deeds, and wills. A particularly meaningful source she found was the manumission documents of a slave owned by a woman. This document combines the experiences of both a person of color and a property-owning woman, two voices that are rarely heard in the written historical record.

Lauren is working on finding documents that contain poetry and other literary works. Some soldiers wrote beautiful moving letters. One letter that is particularly fascinating was one that was written by an ex-soldier to his friend that he met in prison. They were both captured by the British in the war. He finally recounted how he came to be captured and questioned by the British and escaped by digging a hole out of his cell. His story was moving and shows that there is always more to war than the battles. Also, Lauren is working on finding documents written by well-known people and finding another side of them that is rarely seen in public.

During the week the students are here, we will implement these documents and our process in explaining the role of a historian to them, so they can understand the process of formulating a broad topic based on their interests and then research it, shaping the topic to make it more refined and tight. Once they find good sources, they will learn how to analyze them to really understand the document and what it can tell us. Finally, after they have learned to analyze the documents they will be able to interpret them and learn how their interpretation of a document shapes how people perceive it. By the students putting together an exhibit of the documents and presenting their interpretations of them, they will be able to teach people who do not know about the documents. They will also learn about how sites and physical objects can also be interpreted and what the role of Morristown and other Historical National Parks is.

Meet the interns HERE.

This post written by the 2011 Archival Ambassadors Team.

Meet the Archival Ambassadors!

Elizabeth Ambrose

"My name is Elizabeth Ambrose. I just finished my sophomore year at Kutztown University. I am working to get my Bachelors in history and secondary education. I am also volunteering at Fosterfields Living Historical Farm in Morristown this summer."

Andrea Mehler

"My name is Andrea Mehler and I am currently attending Drew University for my Masters degree in History and Culture. Having graduated from The College of New Jersey with a Bachelors in history and a minor in anthropology, I am particularly interested in cultural history and the preservation and use of historical documents and artifacts and how everyday people lived their lives. I am also interested in public history and museums and the way knowledge is disseminated to the general public. Through this program, I hope to develop my archiving, exhibit planning, and teaching skills in order to aide me in my career search. I look forward to working with everyone involved with the Archival Ambassadors program, especially the students!"

Lacey Sparks

"My name is Lacey Sparks and I'm currently pursuing my masters degree in women's and gender history at Rutgers University-Newark. I received my bachelors in history and French at Murray State University, a rural school in Kentucky, my home state. I'm interested in women's and gender history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory, especially within the context of imperial/ colonial history. Cultural history, or the history of everyday life, is of particular importance to me since I like to study groups who were previously left out of the historical record and don't leave many written documents behind. When I grow up I'd like to be a history professor. This program is an excellent fit for me because it combines historical research and teaching, the skills I'll use the most in my career in academia."

Peter Mabli

"My name is Peter Mabli and I am a third year graduate student at Drew University. I currently am working on my Ph.D. in early American intellectual history, specifically the development of universities in the early American republic and their impact on the young nation’s culture and politics. I graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a Bachelors degree in history and a Masters degree in secondary education. In the past I have worked as both a high school history teacher and an adjunct professor. I hope to instill my excitement and passion for history with all the students in the Archival Ambassadors Program, and I look forward to working with everyone!"

Lauren Talley

"My name is Lauren Talley and I am a second year graduate student in the Masters History Program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I received a Honors Baccalaureate degree in History for my undergraduate thesis on Vestal Virgins from the same university. My concentration is in public history but I am also greatly interested in European history. Experience has taught me that the way people perceive the past shapes the future and I feel that it is necessary for me to help people learn how to properly analyze and interpret history. The Archival Ambassadors program will help me learn how to guide and teach others as well as show me new and relatively untouched documents that make me interested in a part of history that I had previously not been interested in."

Learn more HERE.