Author: Danielle J Beaujon (Page 3 of 117)

1) How did you first become interested in Public History?

I first became interested in Public History as a community organizer in Montreal, where I worked at a community kitchen and in solidarity with a local indigenous community. These organizations and campaigns had frequent turnover in membership, and therefore frequent loss of institutional and political memory. I often found myself assuming the role of historian, and became interested in learning techniques for creating historical memory in social justice organizations.

2) What has your career trajectory looked like?

After being out of undergrad for a few years, I moved to New York to start the Masters Program in Archives and Public History at NYU. At the same time, I began working at the Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives as a graduate archival assistant. This was a natural fit for me because I had a background in communist history, and this work experience led me to become interested in the intersection between archives and public history. I graduated from the Archives and Public History Program in 2012, and have since worked at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Tamiment Library. Recently I accepted a new position at the Queens Library, where I will be working on a grant project funded by the Knight Foundation. In partnership with the Metropolitan New York Library Council and the Brooklyn Public Library, the “Culture in Transit” team will bring mobile scanning kits to branch libraries and small cultural heritage institutions to digitize materials from the communities these institutions serve. Digitized materials will be shared through local digital archives and through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). I’m looking forward to this project as a way of bringing together my interests in archives, digitization and public history.

3) Can you tell us about the purpose and mission of the Interference Archive?

The Interference Archive is an all-volunteer run community archive that explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. I was the primary organizer for the archive’s current exhibition, We Won’t Move: Tenants Organize in New York City. The exhibition examines the history of the tenant movement between the 1940s and the present. In addition to highlighting the diverse array of tactics employed by tenant organizers, the exhibition situates the fight for affordable housing within racial and economic justice struggles. I worked with a group of six other volunteers to do research at ten archives and to conduct outreach to over a dozen tenant organizations from across NYC. The exhibition displays flyers, posters, photographs, newspaper clippings and audio recordings, and strives to connect current campaigns with historical organizing. We timed the opening to coincide with the expiration of New York’s rent laws in June 2015.

We created a programming series to accompany the exhibition. We have hosted “Know Your Rights” trainings, film screenings, and panel discussions. We have had great conversations exploring the connections between policing and gentrification, and the roles and limitations of lawyers in the tenant movement. The success of these events has made it clear that New Yorkers are looking for spaces to discuss and learn about their changing communities and their rights as tenants. We also produced an amazing catalog, which brings together the historical content from the exhibition and pairs it with tenant resources, such as a directory, glossary and guide to the organizations who contributed to the show.

4) What are the challenges and benefits of working at an all-volunteer archive?

At an all-volunteer institution people are all donating their professional labor, and have diverse experiences and skills. We worked with an amazing designer, Greg Mihalko, to put the show and catalog together, and many people brought their knowledge and talents to the project. However, it is challenging balancing work and volunteer projects.

5) Have you had any mentors working in the field who influenced you?

I have a number of mentors, many of whom I met as a student in the Archives and Public History program. A few of these people are Melitte Buchman (NYU), Bix Gabriel (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience), and Prithi Kanakamedala (Brooklyn Historical Society, where I interned on the In Pursuit of Freedom project and learned a lot about exhibition development). And of course Peter Wosh has always provided me with advice and guidance both during the program and since graduating.

6) How do you stay connected with other alums?

I have stayed connected to other APH alums who live in NYC through social functions and through working on common projects. I also see alums at conferences like SAA and MARAC, which are great for keeping in touch with people in the field.

7) What advice would you give current students embarking on a study of Public History?

Do internships and get diverse work experience to figure out your interests. Take advantage of opportunities and keep options open because you never know what doors they will open professionally.

8)What are some of your other interests?

I play the drums and enjoy baking.

Armed with a notebook and a pencil, I spent most of my internship at the Brooklyn Historical Society in their research library, pouring over fire insurance atlases. Part of a larger project for a new offsite satellite location on the Brooklyn waterfront, my role was to trace the industrial development of the waterfront. Knowing very little about Brooklyn’s history and even less about the geography, the task before me seemed daunting. Fast forward eighteen weeks and I now possess an intimate knowledge of every fire insurance atlas in BHS collection from 1855 to 1941 for the neighborhoods of DUMBO and Vinegar Hill, can visually picture the development along the waterfront in a time-lapse sequence that plays on a loop in my mind, and rattle off obscure and interesting facts about the major industrial companies and manufacturers on command.

And I couldn’t be more excited.

The research process was frustrating, thrilling, and mostly intriguing. I spent hours with the atlases in the library, going block by block from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Fulton Street from the East River into York Street. My notes reflected the changes in the area as coal sheds, stables, and small warehouses, were replaced by big name coffee companies, shoe factories, and paint companies, among a number of other national manufacturers and industries that called Brooklyn home. Compiling the research was monotonous at times, but in the end I had compiled a 70 page database from thirteen different atlases that chronicled the industrial growth of Brooklyn from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Fulton Street.

Atlas of the City of Brooklyn, G.W. Bromley and Co., 1893

But I had to make the research useable. Coding the companies by type – warehouse, manufacturer, other industry, utility, and community development – was the first step in building a profile of the neighborhoods. The coding led to an index of every company and a note of every atlas they appeared and what they produced. Throughout the course of the project I was aware that I wasn’t going to be at BHS for the duration of the projection and other staff members and researchers would have to use my research. By creating these indexes, along with a master list of each company and their category, the research now held meaning for more than just myself.

Now I had a multicolored word document and a spreadsheet with numerous tabs. From the first leg of my research I was able to figure out who the big players on the waterfront were and from there I began writing short company bios, filled with fun facts and quirky little details, which built the narrative of why these companies were so important to the development of Brooklyn. Some of my favorite odds and ends were things like the National Licorice Company, which was headquartered in DUMBO in the early 20^th century, invented Twizzlers candy which later became a subsidiary of Hershey’s. Or that E.W. Bliss Co., the largest contractor of warheads and torpedoes for the United States Navy, built cars for commercial sale in 1906.

My internship at Brooklyn Historical Society, not only taught me about the history of the waterfront, which was expressed through my research and resulting analysis, but also a worthwhile learning experience. Public history is one of those professions that’s loosely defined and changes from venue to venue. While the semester is ending and my internship has come to close, my experience at BHS helped shape my understanding of public history and my own skills and goals as an emerging professional in the field.

This semester I have been working as an intern at the Guantánamo Public Memory Project (GPMP). GPMP was first launched in 2009 by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience but is now a part of the Humanities Action Lab (HAL) at The New School – more on that later. In 2012 GPMP worked with ten partner Universities, including NYU, to teach a simultaneous course on the “long history” of the US Naval Base at Guantánamo. Each class produced a panel, or in some cases two, that went towards an exhibition that opened in the windows of the Kimmel Center in December 2012 and has now travelled to fifteen Universities in the United States, has been abroad to London, Istanbul, and Brighton, and has been seen by over 500,000 people.

At this point it may seem slightly confusing as to why I am working on a project that was largely focused on creating an exhibition that was long ago finished. Isn’t the project over? Absolutely not. The idea behind GPMP was to create a national dialogue around Guantánamo. At the same time that the exhibition opened a website was launched and it forms a focal point through which to collect further artifacts and stories for the project. Collection is also organized by institutions that take on the exhibition; GPMP will next be displayed at the University of South Carolina and students there have already travelled to Guantánamo itself to interview base residents. This semester I was primarily working on how to archive the GPMP digital and physical collections but also how to make these collections accessible.

GPMP stores its physical collections at Columbia University and they consist mostly of artworks, for example those created by Haitian refugees detained at the base between 1991 and 1994. The majority of the collections are digital and can be found at the Digital Library of the Caribbean. These digital collections are diverse but predominantly consist of family photographs taken by military dependents on the base before they were evacuated during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and oral histories conducted with individuals who have had some sort of connection to Guantánamo. This then encompasses though who remember the base fondly, for example the military families or those who worked at the base, and those who have extremely negative memories, for example refugees detained at the base or those detained as part of the War on Terror.

Within the photographs and the interviews the subject, at least in terms of location, is the same, but they represent very different types of historical sources. The individuals interviewed were very much aware that their story would be going on the historical record; they were either contacted by or made contact with, GPMP, they were interviewed by a student involved with the project, and they gave consent for their interviews to be shared. On the other hand the family photographs were likely never intended to be viewed by anyone without a direct connection to the people being photographed. Throughout the semester the nature of these sources I was dealing with interested me and I wrote two blog posts about it that will be going up on the GPMP website soon.

I also handled all the incoming inquiries that GPMP received. These ranged from artworks that were being donated to the project, to consent forms that needed to be translated from Haitian Kreyol, to individuals that wished to be interviewed for the project. It was a great insight into how projects live on beyond their projected endpoint. With that in mind it’s worth mentioning the work that GPMP has spawned. The project has served as a model for the newly formed Humanities Action Lab and this year it’s first project was launched: a public history of mass incarceration in the United States. The project will follow a similar format to that of GPMP, classes will be taught – this time at over 20 Universities – and each will create a panel for an exhibition. If the Guantánamo example is anything to go by it will be well worth visiting.