I Know What I Did Last Summer...

Good morning, all, this is Brenna signing on! I may be a History Major, but first and foremost, I am a college student. As I begin to write this, it is 11 AM and I have been up for a little less than an hour. Sleeping in: the reason Saturdays are so magical! Especially so this semester, since I have to get up at 7:15 and 8:15 the rest of the week. Anyway, I decided that while I sit in my dorm room and eat my breakfast, I might as well talk about one of the coolest parts of being a History Major: research!

To be specific: last school year, I applied for and won something called the Comegys Bight Fellowship. It sponsors students doing research in American History or who are doing unpaid internships over the summer. The topic that I chose to research was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, specifically, the role of women in the Exposition. The reason why this was perfect for me was that I was doing my research in Chicago, which is the city that hosted the Exposition.

I took the train into the city with my mother, but since she needed to be at work before the reading rooms at the Newberry Library (at left, photo courtesy of http://www.acm.edu/newberry/) opened, I had time to chill. First, I had to take my lovely CTA bus down to the Newberry, where I was doing my research. Then I would usually walk over to the nearby bakery, buy a hot chocolate and a croissant and sit in the park across from the Library and read until 10. If it was rainy, I would sit in the bakery.

For those of you who have never spent any extended amount of time in a large research library, such as the Newberry, you truly do not know what you are missing. First of all, I simply love libraries and books, so being in a nice library with lots of old books was wonderful. I adore them, which is probably why it is a good thing that I’m going into Library Science. Anyway, you go to the reading room and, in the case of the Newberry, they assign you a table to sit at. After a few weeks, they got to know me and always gave me the same table next to the window. Then, you go to the card catalogue on the computers and fill out call slips for the books that you want to look at. You bring them to the front desk, go back to your table and wait. Then, the books are brought out to you! For the larger or more fragile books, they bring out cushions for you to rest them on while you read them. Having never been waited on before in a library, it was a pretty sweet experience.

I worked with quite a few books this summer, both primary and secondary sources, but my favorite of them all was a book from 1893. It was published to go along with the Woman’s Building. It had essays in it from some of the major women involved in the creation of the building, including the head of the Woman’s Board, Bertha Palmer. Let me just say, these women could write. Most of them never had what we would call an extremely good education; women were just being let into colleges within the past decade. However, they certainly knew how to spin a rhetorical phrase or two. Besides this, the book itself was beautiful. The cover was a dark brown with the title and designs embossed into the surface and the edges of the pages were gold. Also, I was holding a book that was over 100 years old! Being into history, nothing beats holding history in your hands.

I’m going to let you go for now, because my fellow blogger, Gillian, my roommate and I are about to go play tennis at the Fitness Center. I shall return to you later, probably at a point when I don’t feel like doing homework anymore.

Brenna