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When John Harry applied for the UWM History Department’s graduate program, he had trouble deciding what area of history he wanted to focus on. “It never occurred to me that I had to pick a lane. I’ve always collected beer antiques, what they call ‘breweriana.’ I was like, what about beer history?” Harry recalled. “Around the same time, (a woman named) Theresa McCulla got her job as the beer historian at the Smithsonian. I thought, that’s amazing. I can combine my love of beer and history.” Now, thanks to his research, Harry is wrapping up a summer internship working for McCulla at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The internship started as a pie-in-the-sky idea to fulfill an internship requirement for Harry’s degree. “I figure, shoot high, right? If I could study with somebody and learn what they do, who would I want to be with?” Harry asked. The answer was, of course, the beer historian herself, Theresa McCulla. Harry sent her an email asking if she would be willing to take him on. Despite obstacles like the government’s fiveweek shutdown this past December and January, they eventually connected and McCulla agreed to mentor Harry for a summer internship. He’s spent the past two months assisting McCulla with her job as one of the curators at the American History Museum. His main duties include transcribing and adding metadata to almost 40 oral histories McCulla has collected from people involved in the history of craft beer and home brewing. A major highlight of his internship was being able to go along with McCulla to two breweries to record these oral histories, where he was able to contribute by asking his own questions. Harry was also accepted to write a blog post on the history of the legality of homebrewing for the museum’s website.
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When he’s not working on McCulla’s research, Harry is conducting his own. His UWM thesis focuses on the role of African American labor and consumerism in the Civil Rights era surrounding breweries, so Harry’s been digging up old labor documents at the Library of Congress and the Beer Institute lobbying firm in D.C., among other places.
