The Question of Olustee

This week we had our workshop on Web design and WordPress. We focus on learning about using WordPress since it's the tool we plan on using to build our site. I have previously had some experience with WordPress; it was one option I looked at when starting this blog. I chose Blogger since I found WordPress confusing and wasn't sure how to use it. WordPress allows anyone to make a sleek site, but the interface isn't always clear. However, this work shows cleared up any confusion I had with WordPress. Doctor Giroux from UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research walked us through WordPress, and we started thinking about what we need from the website. There is a lot to the backend of a website. There are some things I learned during my high school web design class that I remembered such as a responsive site, which is when the website changes size with the size of the device you are viewing it on. We talked about it when in high school, but we used different terms. Wor...

 We are coming up on the last month of this internship, along with my last month of my bachelor's degree. As we have been working these past few months, we have been making slow progress on the various tasks I have talked about in past posts. However, I believe it's better at taking our time rather than rushing. We are nearing the end now and wrapping up the work we have been doing. There is not much new to report on that front since we are simply continuing and finishing what we have been doing. We have pushed our web design workshop back to next week. I am still looking forward to learning more about web design. It also marks the end of our work on this project. I am looking forward to taking these skills onward into the next stage of my life and further into grad school. Overall, I am grateful for this experience. On the Olustee front, I have submitted one of the group's works to Doctor Gannon for review, including the new context we added. So I spent some time over the ...

Coming into this new week, I am adding to the work we have from last semester. In this week's meeting, Doctor Gannon and I reviewed some work I have done. While looking it over, we decided we need more context regarding contemporary action. So I started work on that addition. Particularly regarding the discussion over the removal of monuments. I have been reading various news articles about the subject. This has been an issue brought up by many for years. However, now cities are removing Confederate monuments.  I read an interview with Annette Gordon-Reed, who is a professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law. This interview brought up something I hadn't thought about. While discussing the monuments of Washington and Jefferson, who also owned slaves, Gordon-Reed states "...No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because, without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation. They put up monuments ...

 Week ten is now coming to a close. This week has been mainly finishing up and double-checking the review work I have done for the contemporary action group. I have enjoyed reading the materials the group gathered. It has brought up many issues to my attention that I did not originally think of. I have shared my initial thoughts regarding the different viewpoints on confederate monuments. In my experience, people did not seem to care so much about their local history, but as I have seen with these different new articles, there are many people who care deeply and have a variety of views.  I am reviewing all the notes and work I have done regarding this group. It is a slow process, but it's important to check a few times. Mostly I have been rechecking if all citations are in Chicago Manual format, all URLs are working, organizing the sources, checking the citations in the narrative, and rereading the narrative. For this week that had been the primary goal.  This is all to m...

Last week I started a conversation about the Monuments of Olustee and in that post, I briefly mentioned Lake City and their Olustee monument. Now, some Confederate monuments are being moved by the communities in which they exist, especially after the death of George Floyd. The monument of Olustee at Lake City is one such monument that is being considered. In Lake City, there is an Olustee monument . The initial question is whether to move the monument? The city council had voted to move it, but there had been some question over who owns the monument and the land it sits on. The city had requested a quitclaim deed for the land.  Now, like with the monuments I discussed last week, some disagree. This article about a county meeting discussing this issue provides further information than what I may discuss here. The people who addressed the council all had their own opinions. The article linked shows many of them. When looking at the Union monument, they brought the concern over editi...

Starting off this week, I shifted my focus from working mainly on the Aftermath of the Battle to the Contemporary Action. I thought it was a good time to change the primary focus of what I was working on. Now the Contemporary action group focused their work on the work done with the battleground recently. This week I have been slowly working my way through their sources. I have enjoyed reading the news articles they have collected. Many of which bring up an interesting discussion for the future of the field.  There have been discussions over putting a Union monument on the field. Now, this was a few years back, but it relates to some newer articles written about various monuments. With the prospect of putting up a sole union monument down on the land, there were many people who did not like the idea. The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War submitted the proposal for the union monument. Some felt that there was no need for a sole Union monument since the Confederate one mentions...