Week of 6/07-6/11 Internship blog

I have completed another productive week at the foundation. Of my two projects, the movie theater project is farther along than Winter Garden at Work. This week I focused a lot on the theater exhibit, and finished the first draft of the captions, which encompasses most of the text. I have already picked out what I believe are the best pictures for the exhibit, but of course that can change. At this point I must continue to curate objects and decide which will be put into the exhibit. There are some obvious inclusions, such as some chairs that were used in the old Winter Garden Theatre and movie posters.

Admittedly, progress has been slower on Winter Garden at Work. The topic is more broad than the movie theater exhibit and so I have to look through more files to find information. In my research I have hit a couple of bumps. The first is that when I am using secondary sources the authors that wrote the histories (at least the ones that I have found so far in the archive) tend to neglect history that is in between the time of writing and the earliest history. As such, it has been harder to find information about businesses, groves, or railroads in the early to mid 20th century compared to the late 20th century or late 19th century. In addition, when people write histories they tend to leave out details about what laborers do, and tend to focus on the stories of the bosses and entrepreneurs. This is not unexpected and the story of the bosses is important as well as the workers, but there needs to be a balance and I would like the exhibit to more balanced than most of the sources I have found. To find information about common workers I have had to look more at primary financial documents and the like to get an insight into their lives.  Despite these problems I am still making good additions and look forward to continuing my work next week.

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