Department Archives: History

The RICHES™ project at UCF recently conducted a History Harvest event with the St. Cloud Historical Society. Led by Dr. Connie Lester, RICHES™ works to research, document, and make digitally available information on Florida’s regional history and to develop digital research tools. St. Cloud citizens contributed images, objects and documents in an effort to digitally preserve their community’s history as part of the harvest.

In a recent article published by The Global Post, UCF Professor of History Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández argues that historians occupy a unique position to shed light on present-day circumstances. Martínez-Fernández also feels that historians’ ability to perform this task has come under attack in recent years.

Mark Bruckert, a sophomore at the Crooms Academy of Information Technology and a member of the Oviedo Historical Society, recently installed his Eagle Scout project at the Lawton House Museum in Oviedo. The installation of iPads allows visitors to the Lawton House to connect to Oviedo artifacts stored in the RICHES Mosaic Interface database, as well as items in Florida Memory, the Florida Historical Society, and DiaryEarth.

UCF Professor of History Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández has been appointed to the board of the National Council for History Education (NCHE). Since 1990, the NCHE has worked to promote excellence in K-12 and college-level history education.

As a first-generation college graduate, Holly Baker is ready and eager to embark on her career as a public historian. Beginning in February, she will join the Florida Historical Society as Public History Coordinator and Manager of the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa.

The UCF History Department exhibit, Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Native Village’: Historic Eatonville Remembered, hosted on the first-floor gallery wall in the John C. Hitt Library, explores Hurston’s anthropological research into the people, history and culture of Eatonville.

After a successful year of initiatives, Veterans Month and a commemoration in St. Augustine, UCF’s Veterans Legacy Program team reflects on the year and looks forward into 2019.

The Geneva Historical & Genealogical Society, one of the earliest community partners of RICHES, held a memorial service on October 10 to honor the centenary of the death of Roderick “Perry” Taylor. Taylor, a native of the small rural community in east Seminole County, died when a World War I German submarine torpedoed the ship, the R.M.S. Leinster, in the Irish Sea near the coastal town of Dun Laoghaire.

History professor Dr. Rosalind Beiler has been examining how correspondence networks among European Quakers, Mennonites and Pietists shaped early modern global migration patterns.

Led by a UCF alum, Hero Spark is an after-school program that uses role-playing games to help teenagers improve their self-esteem and hone their social skills. Step through the automatic glass doors of the Orlando Public Library, hang a left and soon after you’ll start to hear it. The rolling of dice. Outbursts of laughter. […]