This is the fourth in a series of ongoing blog posts from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI), spotlighting the labor of Smithsonian media collections staff across more »
I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt more »
An activist, a teacher, a poet — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an extraordinary figure in American history. She was born free in the city of Baltimore in 1825, orphaned at the age more »
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has in its collections a copy of Twelve Years a Slave: The Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped more »
Anyone interested in knowing more about the African diaspora, American slavery, or the twentieth century African American migration to northern U.S. cities will find insights at the National Museum of more »
Patrice Green is a Smithsonian Minority Awards Intern with Smithsonian Libraries at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is currently pursuing a dual master’s in Public History and Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, where her focus is Archives and Preservation Management.
As a public history and library/information science student at the University of South Carolina, I often find myself confronting living memory. In the archives profession, it becomes even more apparent, especially when cultivating relationships with donors, friends, and other supporters of an information or cultural institution. This summer, I had the wonderful opportunity to intern as a Minority Awards Scholar with Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), funded generously by the Office of Fellowships and Internships (OFI) and supervised by archivist Ja-Zette Marshburn. In these ten weeks, I have learned a tremendous amount about the profession of archives, libraries, and museums. I gained experience in everything from data entry and object handling to consulting and appraisal. I discovered the depth of the collections at the Smithsonian, as well as how far the subject matter spreads. I learned exactly how important it was to separate archival collections from curatorial ones. Perhaps most importantly, I was reminded that the profession is all about stories and those who work to preserve them.
At the beginning of February, Black History Month, the former slave Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was much in the news. The most prominent African American of the 19th century, he first moved to Washington, D.C. in the early 1870s after his home in Rochester, New York burned down. Here he published his newspaper, The New National Era. From 1877 until his death in 1895, Douglass lived and worked in a stately Victorian house, called Cedar Hill, overlooking the Anacostia River. The property is in the D.C. Southeast quadrant and has been maintained since 1988 as a National Historic Site by the National Park Service.
