WWPL Volunteer Diaries

In week 7 I was able to find many more interesting images from the “Monograph of Haiti,” a document of intelligence complied by U.S. Marines during their time in Haiti, published in 1932. Some of my favorite images are aerial photographs of cities in Haiti, and there are many of Port-au-Prince.

I have started reading Raphael Dalleo’s “American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism,” but the book focuses more on literature during the period of American imperialism than what was specifically happening in Haiti, but the introduction was useful.

Last week I was able to finish proofreading my Introduction page for the exhibit, as well as create and finish writing another page, “The NAACP and The Nation Investigate.” The “Investigate” page still needs images added to it, so I am currently trying to determine which of the images I’ve found should go where, especially since I have many more pages to create for the exhibit.

I was able to pick up “American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism” by Raphael Dalleo. Reviews of the book mentioned a rich use of primary sources, so I am hoping to find more images and primary source material to add to my information.

This week I plan on making my way through the book and taking notes on it, searching for more images, and creating more pages for the exhibit.

Week 5 was extremely fruitful in terms of finding photos and primary sources to look through. “Racism in U.S. Imperialism” by Rubin Francis Weston was useful in providing a comprehensive look at the U.S. occupation of Haiti, as well as primary source footnotes that will be useful in my exhibit.

I also started putting together the introduction page on my online exhibit. I will be working on pages on topics concerning:

• The NAACP and The Nation investigates Haiti
• History of U.S. Imperialism and “The White Man’s Burden”
• The Monroe Doctrine and its Expansion under Wilson
• The Hispaniola Senate Hearings
• Haitian Responses to Occupation
• Freedom of the Haitian Press
• Lasting effects of Occupation

I was also able to find many photos from 1915-1921, but one of the struggles I am facing is finding photos of Haitians. Many of the photos are of Marines and their weapons, bases, and daily life.

I was able to make a trip to Charlottesville in order to pick up some books for my research. Unfortunately, the book that contained the most primary sources had been moved into storage to prepare for upcoming renovations to the library. I have requested the item, so hopefully they are able to find it.

In the next few weeks, I plan on making a trip to Washington, D.C. in order to look at Marine accounts from Haiti in the National Archives. I’m hoping to find source material for the violence being inflicted on the Haitians by the USMC, as claimed in many of The Nation articles. In the meantime, I will be making my way through the books I have now and narrowing in on my exhibit topic.

This week, I read through the NAACP Haiti account written by James Weldon Johnson in 1920. After traveling to Haiti, he summarized his investigation into the current conditions in Haiti and reasons for American intervention. According to Weldon, the U.S. believed Haiti had reached a state of anarchy intolerable in the civilized world, Haitians demonstrated “absolute unfitness” to govern themselves, and Haiti has benefitted from American control.

I have also ready through several articles published in The Nation in 1920 by Johnson and others. In Johnson’s articles, he focused on one topic, like the control the National City Bank had over the finances of Haiti, in order to shed light on the motivations of the United States in occupying Haiti. Helena Hill Weed wrote an article detailing the Senate hearings on Haiti and Santo Domingo, in which several high-ranking officers testified that there was no plan for development in Haiti and the U.S. did not uphold their end of the treaty.

Next, I’m planning to read through the Senate hearing documents in order to have primary source material for the above articles. I am also hoping to find more accounts from the NAACP or The Nation that include the Haitian response to U.S. occupation.

Over the past month or so, I have been working on transcribing the Ellen Axson letters. It has been really interesting to read about all of the different experiences in her life that she recorded. I also really enjoyed seeing the patterns in her writing, both with her handwriting and different words and phrases she used a lot in her writing. Now I’m working with Archives Space and uploading the Grayson collection finding aids to the site. The next agenda is continued work on the finding aids project, as well as working on digitizing the Grayson photo collection.

Last week, I was able to finish labelling and describing our Haiti sources. I made note of interesting texts that I would like to revisit when putting together my online exhibit. I was especially looking for sources that revealed the intentions of the U.S. occupation. I also began looking for visuals from the Library of Congress and National Archives. I’ve found many newspaper articles from the very beginning of the U.S. occupation, and I am still making my way through years of clippings on the LOC website.

I am starting to finalize my online exhibit topics, and I am hoping to focus on three topics:

• Haitian Responses to the U.S. Occupation
• “The White Man’s Burden” and U.S. Imperialism
• The Expansion of the Monroe Doctrine under Wilson

My name is Ashley Botkin, and I will be a fourth-year at the University of Virginia in the fall. I’m a double-major in art history and religious studies, a docent and museum assistant at the Fralin Museum of Art, and the assistant managing editor for The Cavalier Daily. I am currently interning with Mark in the Archives Department of the LARC. I’ve been awarded a grant from the Mellon Indigenous Arts Program at U.Va., and the main focus of my research will be on indigenous African peoples.

This past week I spent my time proofreading entries in the Race and Segregation Collection, and it was interesting to see how many people were writing to President Wilson regarding lynchings in the United States. One letter especially stood out to me due to its visual language.

For Week 2, I’ll be starting on my digital exhibit project on the U.S. occupation of Haiti during Woodrow Wilson’s term.

Hello! My name is Mallory Goodine, and I am a senior Anthropology major at Mary Baldwin University. I have been working with Emily in the Education Department since early September. I work with her on a lot of different projects as she tries to revamp the entire department and all of the programs at the museum. My main project has been creating a finding aid for teachers to use on the website. For a couple months now I have been combing through the Research section of the website for documents, letters, and photographs that pertain to teaching standards for the state of Virginia. It has been sort of difficult trying to find the sources I need, but I know that Mark’s interns are working hard to make sure that everything is on the website! You can find my work under the Teacher Resources tab on the website. While it still continues to be a work in progress, I have already managed to collect a substantial amount of resources that cover 5 subjects and 22 topics. I have greatly enjoyed my time here at Woodrow Wilson with Emily, as she is always giving me new challenging projects to work on! From learning how to use website developers like Omeka to helping create programs for kids at the museum, I have definitely learned a lot.

My name is Matthew Fosdick and I am a senior at JMU. I have been interning for the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library for over two months now. Since starting as an intern I have been working on the Eleanor Wilson McAdoo Collection at University of California-Santa Barbara. This collection consisted of many letters between the Wilson family as well as memorial and commencement speeches. In the beginning this project consisted of creating and uploading an entirely new entry on the Omeka site. The collection information came in the form of a spread sheet and I entered that information into the Dublin core, Item Type Metadata, EAD Archive, Files and Tags. Much of the information that was needed was found in the spreadsheet but the spreadsheet was not very well organized nor entirely accurate. This made the entire process sluggish. After a couple of weeks the information on the spreadsheet was uploaded to Omeka all at once, something that I did not do. The information uploaded was all accurate and made my job much easier and more streamlined. All I had to do then was edit and arrange the uploaded documents and make them public. This editing ranged from correcting simple spelling errors to re-creating the entire uploaded document depending on the discrepancies between the actual document and the uploaded version. I have completed the entire collection of 141 documents and I feel that I have made a contribution to the archives here.