Week 2 Internship blog

             Hello, its Patrick Callaghan once again with my second blog post on the second week of my internship. Due to us not having a meeting the first week, this week we got to learn the controversial and opaque lore and story behind the battle of Olustee and its current day circumstances surrounding the Union soldiers who fought there. To be honest, while learning about the situation of what our internship is focusing on, I was truly astonished by the story Dr. Gannon explained to us. Not just the history behind it but also her own experience visiting the site herself. As someone who enjoys traveling and going to historical places, I attempt to always visit monuments and cemeteries of the fallen US soldiers both at home and abroad. These places carry an aura about them, they are very well kept, and the environment is quite pleasant. So when Dr. Gannon showed us the pictures of where the recognition of the union soldiers is and how un-kept it was and the lack of attention it seems to have, all I had left were questions. First, the obvious one being why there was a confederate memorial in good conditions on the actual battlefield and why there was no Union memorial on the battlefield? Second, being that I have been to a few military cemeteries and have seen the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and how they are respected and treated, so why are these Union soldiers not treated the same way? These are some of the questions that entered my mind when learning the background of the battle of Olustee and represent the questions we look to solve in our goal to bring a memorial to the Olustee battleground for the Union soldiers.

Following the information provided by Dr. Gannon we were asked about some skills that we had and how they would be able to provide further progress to the project. These included experience working on a website and story maps or story mapping. Things of course I have never done to great detail. So during this week I have been looking more into story maps and how websites work manly using YouTube and other video like platforms to grasp a basic understanding of what we are possibly expected to do. Along with this, I have also been catching up with the work that has been completed prior to me joining the group.

Even though we have a lot of information collected by previous group members and tools to help progress through our schedule, it appears that the biggest issues or struggles that I will have in this group will be my lack of experience working with websites and other aspects to achieve our goals. Along with these is also the challenge of a lack of information that was on purposely disregarded and groups that may look down on what we are trying to do, for some reason. However, these challenges will be a great sneak peek into what working in History will be like and expand my researching ability to the next level helping me in my studies in the future.