A Recap From This Year’s Dangremond Museum Studies Interns

Each year, the Connecticut Museum accept two college students or recent graduates into the Dangremond Museum Studies Internship program. This summer the Museum welcomed Joel Bishop, a recent graduate of Williams College who double majored in History and Political Science, and Jack Abbot, currently studying History at Southern Connecticut State University Honors College. We’re pleased to introduce them as featured writers of this blog post to recap their experience with us: 

2025 Dangremond interns Jack (left) and Joel (right) stand in front of their completed display.

During our internship with the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, we received the opportunity to experience working in a number of different departments in which we gained the tools and experience to help us achieve our professional goals. We rotated between Education, Collections, and Exhibitions, working on three main projects.

Creating an Exhibition

Dangremond interns Jack and Joel set up collection items for the Nawrot Nook display.

In Exhibitions, we had the chance to create a display in the Nawrot Nook titled “Top Secret: Codes and Community.” For this display, we were able to work on every stage of the exhibit process, from conception and initial research to installation. As we analyzed primary source documents, we found a story being told. Secret codes were being used for businesses, organizations, and even a little girl’s diary. We realized that we were being told a story of codes being used to build communities. We tried to help share this story by giving younger audiences a chance to learn about these codes by doing their own decoding work. There was a collection item that we desperately wanted to be in the exhibit: a letter written to a man named “Benjamin Farrar” about the secret exchange of enslaved children. As historians, we felt that this added nuance to our community theme. However, the item ended up being cut from the display because it demanded more explanation and context than the exhibit could allow it. That, along with the age of our target audience, lead the item to being cut from the display.

Organizing the Collection

We took part in the much larger American Revolution Papers project that the Museum is conducting in preparation for America’s 250th birthday. Each of us got the chance to work on a collection from these papers. Both of us enjoyed taking part in this project, and it allowed us to see the full process of digitization. We each received a collection containing around 60 documents tailored to our own interests. We catalogued, numbered, arranged, and scanned each document. We then created a finding aid for our collections to help researchers engage with these documents. This project opened our eyes to the laborious process of making a collection accessible to the public. And, as both of us have experience conducting archival research, we now have greater appreciation for all that goes on behind the scenes to make such research possible. 

Creating Education Resources

In Education, we also got a chance to take part in a larger project: “History in our Backyard.” This project aims to create a teaching tool through Google Earth that will provide information on historical sites, which correlate to items in the Museum’s collection, that children can visit in every Connecticut town. For our assignment, we completed all the research for New Haven County. This project provided several challenges, as many towns lack historical societies, and the ones that do exist are often underfunded, making research more complicated. 

Museums Across the State

We also received the chance to go on a few side adventures. This included field trips to the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Mystic Seaport Museum. Through these trips, we learned that these different museums experience many of the same challenges that we do at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and history but have their own unique ways of approaching them. A great example of this comes from the issue of humidity in collection storage.

Dangremond interns and Museum staff visit the New Britain Museum of Art.

We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to intern at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. We have been provided with the skills and knowledge to achieve our academic and professional goals. The two of us have very different ideas of where to go next but we will be forever thankful for our time here! 

-Jack Abbot and Joel Bishop 

Special thanks to David W. Dangremond for his continued support of this program. To learn more about the Dangremond Museum Studies Internship, click here.