BVU History Major Records War Artifacts at Home
After traveling to six foreign countries, a BVU history major is digging into an archiving internship. Andrew Hoffman is spending his summer reorganizing veterans' collections for the Carver County Historical Society.
Andrew Hoffman has witnessed historical sites through Buena Vista University travel opportunities in Greece, Poland, Israel, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.
This summer, the BVU senior to-be experiences world history close to home, working as a collections/archives intern for the Carver County Historical Society in Waconia, Minn.
“My big project this summer is to reorganize the veterans’ collections,” says Hoffman, a history major from Chanhassen, Minn. “This area of the facility has all kinds of artifacts from World War I and World War II.”
“I knew I wanted to be a history major. I came to BVU and Dr. Bill Feis and Dr. Dixee Bartholomew-Feis got me even more engaged in the field.”
Andrew Hoffman
Using the Past Perfect application, Hoffman assigns an object number to each item and researches each item in his effort to provide a detailed description of each artifact.
“I’m more into the Civil War, but doing work on World War I and II items has helped me broaden my scope,” he says.
Hoffman notes that most museums display but a small fraction of the collections they possess. Still, work must be done to accurately record and catalogue everything that’s been donated over several decades.
“I’ll go through several thousand artifacts this summer, but I’ll really enjoy doing it,” says Hoffman, who hopes to attend graduate school following his 2020 graduation from BVU.
“In high school, history was really the only class that I was really interested in,” he says “I knew I wanted to be a history major. I came to BVU and Dr. Bill Feis (professor of history) and Dr. Dixee Bartholomew-Feis (professor of history, dean) got me even more engaged in the field.”