Skip to main content

NARA Trip I

Our only trip off campus today involved a visit to the NARA facility nearest to us here at University of Maryland. It's a secondary building for the Archives, known informally as Archives II. It's the repository for most post-World War I documents for the U.S. government.

For a history nerd, this is a pretty cool credential.
Our visit was relatively brief. Just long enough to get our researcher cards. We'll need these for our research session Wednesday. I'm getting excited about what we might find that day. Roughly, we have about seven hours to look through materials that volunteers have pulled that could be of relevance to Bill's service. We're permitted to bring a camera, but not much else. We've been warned to clear off lots of memory on our cards.

This might be a nice time to point out where we are. We're staying at the University of Maryland, which is on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Any trip into the city takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on traffic. But the archives is a quick five-minute drive.


The campus here is quite nice. We're staying in a dorm that offers two-person rooms in pairs, and each pair of rooms shares one bathroom. Well, that's true for teachers and the girls on the trip. The boys are in more traditional dorm rooms with a common bathroom. I use the term common loosely, for the carpeting, walls, ambience . . . it feels more like a SpringHill Suites than it does a dorm. It makes Hanson Hall back in Gettysburg in 1994 feel pretty humble.

One of the two lounge areas in our dormitory. 

The boys' hallway.

Our dorm is to the right of this photograph. 
We work and learn in a classroom on the ground floor of our dormitory. So far we've had four lectures and a work session in that space. It suits us well.

A view from our classroom. 

The map of the world I drew during this morning's workshop. 

Today was the first day I got out on foot by myself at the University, which was good. Until today I felt very disoriented outside, not really knowing which direction was which, or where I was in relation to the rest of campus. It's making sense now.

The kids, by the way, have really mixed well. We've noticed no instances yet of a student eating alone. They travel in packs, often by room assignment. But I also don't see evidence that cliques have formed. They're taking on an attitude of Is everyone here? Good. Let's go. A few minutes ago, all fifteen of them went out together for a shopping run before dinner. And all of them were wearing their red windbreakers. Quite a neat sight.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Thoughts on Liberation

One of the markers placed by the French and Belgian governments to mark the path of the liberators.  My greatest takeaway from this most recent trip involves some refined feelings about liberation. I'm writing this post in a time of high cynicism. And the were matters of which one could be cynical back in 1944, the year in which Charlie fought and died. This trip, however, left me with renewed appreciation for what our country did back in that war, helping me refocus on what I've had the chance to see and do the past few years. Christopher is the military historian who accompanied us on this voyage. In one of our webinars this spring, he made an offhand reference to a piece of scholarship about the Holocaust he said was worth reading. It's entitled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's heavy. I can't say I read every chapter. But I read most of it on our bus rides this summer. And I'm glad I did. My unassigned reading. Saying that Bloo
1 comment
Read more

Those whom we honored (the final eulogies)

The chapel interior at Luxembourg American Cemetery. Most of us on the trip completed research for soldiers buried at Luxembourg American Cemetery. It's situated right outside of Luxembourg City and it receives a good number of visitors every year. The fact that General George Patton is buried there has something to do with their high visitorship. In fact, the initial attempt to bury him along with the soldiers failed when the foot traffic to his grave wore out the grass. Patton's grave now sits by itself near the top of the hill at the cemetery, near the chapel and tablets of the missing. Suzy's soldier. Six of us delivered eulogies that day: five teachers and Kaat. When I had the chance to listen to students' eulogies back in 2017, I was struck by how something of each student's character worked itself into the story they told. I still get a bit of a sense of that with eulogies delivered by teachers. However, the element that works itself more powerfull
Post a Comment
Read more

About that observant fella . . .

Alan and I atop a Sherman. I often compliment my daughter on being observant (and she is!). In some ways, I'm trying to call her attention to something I wish I were better at. That is, being observant. Alan has the gift Caroline does. Two interesting examples of it. While trying to find dinner one night in Paris, Alan caught a sign written in French that said something-something about the times of Christ. Turns out, it was a pathway to an ancient Roman arena where gladiator matches might have once taken place. I know. It looks like a park or courtyard. It really is a relic of the Roman era, though, right in a neighborhood in Paris. On our final night of the trip came another moment. Alan came across a pair of stumbling stones, which we weren't aware existed in Belgium. Stumbling stones are a form of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust. They are placed in locations where individuals have memory of those victims last being seen. These were relatively
Post a Comment
Read more