Week Four, in which the intern starts putting it all together

One of my segment topics

Wait we are at week four of the summer term already? One third of our time is gone? Well it is a good thing that I have been busy dear follower. Today I am putting the finishing touches on the abstracts that I will be sending to Dr. Ben Brotemarkle and keeping him informed of my progress. Right now I have contacted several interviewees for two of the segments and am waiting to start scheduling for recording them. Two of the segments I have already developed (in my mind). These being a segment on the Citrus Tower in Clermont, Florida and a segment on the 88 year football rivalry between St. Cloud High and Osceola High Schools. Most of the research has been done for both seeing as how I have taken the oft used avenue of using research from papers that I have already done for other courses. Oh surely it is a time honored tradition of master's level historians to lazily mine previous research for other projects. Quite simply I have no time between class, the internship, life, a new kitten who will not stop nibbling my toes, babysitting
a grand-daughter, and previous commitments, to come up with some dazzling new topic or novel approach. Again I see myself as some sort of academic juggler, juggling all of these things, not wanting to drop any of them and dividing my time between them all.
     Enough woolgathering, some of the new topics I discussed with Dr. Brotemarkle were doing a segment on the 50th anniversary of UCF, and some new information that I will be keeping top secret from you dear follower until I get the go ahead from the parties involved. I can give you a hint and say the following words: newspaper, civil rights, drywall. No, no, no dear follower. I will not divulge any information until later. Deal with it. I am up to my armpits in secondary sources, books, kittens, a 3 year old grand-daughter, and course work and I am not going to give in to your pleadings. Wait and see. I promise it will be good.

The new kitten and I hard at work on secondary source analysis

     So that is where I stand now. Completing abstracts, coordinating interviews, and completing secondary source analysis on MORE books. I and Dr. Beiler agreed that the annotated bibliography was a bit heavy on practical works and light on theory. Ah, but do not fret, we have that under control. Dr. Linenthal has a book on public history theory and communication that will take care of everything. I have read his other books and am quite certain it will deal with happy topics and sunshine ( I am of course being sarcastic), and of course I still kept my books from the Intro to Public History class. And no dear followers I did not write in big black magic marker the words discourse and consensus history in them. I saved that for the secondary source analyses. Until next week.