The Adventures of a Novice Historian

Prior to going back to school in 2014 I was kind of lost, I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I developed a love for history, when I was about twelve. It began when I watched a National Geographic documentary about Egyptian history, and it just snowballed from there. When I was 13, my mother pulled me out of public school and began to home-school me which is when my passion was allowed to flourish. Every time I went somewhere historic with my family, I had to know everything I could before our visit and when people came to see us I had to play tour guide. At the time it never occurred to me that I could apply both my passion for history and my need to tell people what I knew together.  When I started at UNCA, I could not have imagined I would have had an opportunity to put those two things together. So, when I began my internship at Vance over the summer, I didn't know what to expect. Which is understandable given that I had never done anything like it before.  ...

This weeks post is a little different from my usual post. This week in class Dr. Pearson asked us to sit down with our internship supervisors and discuss the following three questions and reflect on them. 1. What was the most contentious interaction/issue you have had at this site with regard to diversity and inclusion?  For this question, Lauren said that the biggest interactions she has had with people, since starting at Vance, have been through the sites Social Media accounts. People have often had a preconceived notion of what the site is and get upset when it doesn't match their ideas. She gave me three examples of the most recent interactions she's had. The first being from a man who didn't agree with a post on Facebook about the reasons for the start of the Civil War. He had a stereotypical reaction of it not being about Slavery and more about Northern aggression. He also felt that being inclusive was not a good thing. The second was from a woman who thought...