Battle of Olustee Project | Aaron Connors

          Hello everyone, Aaron here checking for another week of the Olustee project internship. From what I’ve been through this week, both concerning the internship and concerning my other classes, I can tell that next week could potentially be my busiest week yet (an outcome I should have expected, honestly). Next week, I have an exam in my anthropology class, my first one this semester. I’m not particularly worried about that exam content-wise, but the simple mention of an exam naturally puts me a little on edge. Rather, I am a bit more nervous about what I will be doing for the internship. Granted, the progress the project has made in this last week is superb; I am not upset about that at all—it's more the fact that I think I’ll be outside my comfort zone next week.         This week, the other interns and I received an email from Dr. Gannon detailing how one of her associates took the information from the book detailing the O...

                 Hello all, Aaron reporting in again for the second week of the internship. This week has been a bit more work intensive, not in the internship itself, but in the work for all of my other classes. Even though the Olustee Project is not technically a “class” at UCF, it practically functions as one, meaning that this is the first semester I’ve had more than four classes. With a greater focus on my upper-levels and my Anthropology minor this school year, the workload has increased by a fair bit; it provides an obstacle for me to overcome when finding time to peruse the materials Dr. Gannon has been sending me and the team. Nonetheless, in the first few days of this week, I was able to read some of the material Dr. Gannon sent out, including a paper that summarizes the situation at the Olustee battleground (a summary more succinctly reiterated in the meeting we had today). I’ll give a similarly short summary for any students ...

              Hello all, my name is Aaron Connors, and I am currently a sophomore at the University of Central Florida majoring in History and minoring in Anthropology. While I am not the first member of my immediate family to go to college (that honor belongs to my father), I will hopefully be the first among my relatives to finish college with a bachelor’s degree.                My interest in history as a discipline stems from all the way back to middle school, although at that time it was much more of a passive interest, with little actual substance. Only in my freshman year of high school did I meet someone who showed me the importance of understanding the contemporary world with the lens of past events: my AP Human Geography teacher, who was quite an eclectic and spirited man that made a class I might have found boring in middle school one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in academi...