As an intern with the East Tennessee Historical Society, Baker Tuthill is part of an interdisciplinary research team uncovering the city’s stories.
William “Baker” Tuthill is broadening his student experience through an internship with the East Tennessee Historical Society (ETHS). The work allows him to apply what he has learned as a history and public affairs major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to benefit the local community.
“Did you know that 28 percent of Knoxville’s heads-of-household were people of color in 1870, right after the Civil War? Or that Irish immigrant heads-of-household made up 6 percent of the city in the same year? Nobody did, until we merged disciplines and did the research,” said Tuthill.
He began the paid internship in spring 2026, working on digitization of the 1870 Knoxville census, and was invited to return in the fall semester, as work begins on the 1880 census, under a special project funded by the Tennessee National Civil War Heritage Area.
“This project has allowed us to collect lots of data and discover countless amazing stories about the incredible people who lived here 150 years ago,” Tuthill said. “Other researchers have suggested that Knoxville was relatively racially integrated in 1870, but that the neighborhoods started to become more segregated starting in the 1880s. We’re very interested to see if the data in the two censuses support that idea, or suggest something new.”
As part of his internship, Tuthill also is writing a brief history of the 1st US Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment, stationed in Knoxville during the final days of the Civil War.
“With such a rich history as we have in East Tennessee, there is still so much to learn,” he said.
History Professor Chris Magra informed students about several internships, and Tuthill was excited about the opportunity to work with a local museum. “After getting so much training for history writing at UT, I wanted to use those skills and get some real experience in the field,” he said.
Tuthill’s spring internship was sponsored by UT’s Department of History and the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War. During the fall semester he is serving as the ETHS and UT history department’s Bergeron Intern, named in memory of Professor Emeritus Paul Bergeron.
Honing Analytical Skills
Tuthill is preparing for a career as a policy analyst, a field that looks at the past, present, and future of government policies and makes arguments about them. That work can be informed by the work of historians, he noted.
While most of his history courses have focused on medieval European and Anatolian history, Tuthill recognizes how coursework applies to his work at the museum.
“Thinking critically about the treatment of historical minorities, such as I did in Dr. Bauer’s Native America in Film, has helped me look into female and Black heads-of-households in 1870s Knoxville,” he said. “And studying the inner-workings of complex social and judicial systems, like I did in Dr. Black’s History of the Spanish Inquisition, has allowed me to think about the systems that recruited and sustained Black union soldiers in Knoxville.”
Through UT’s Department of History, Tuthill gained not only knowledge of the past but the skills to think critically across topics.
“Dr. Black taught me to think more analytically and dig into primary sources deeper than I ever had before, far below the surface of what documents want to say to uncover what they’re not saying out loud,” he said. “Dr. Nasser gave me a completely new appreciation for China through modern Chinese history.”
“It is often said that college should teach you how to think, not what to think, and in my experience the professors in the history department are fantastic at the former and staunchly committed to avoiding the latter,” Tuthill said.
For him the internship has connected his experiences through not only his history courses, but also the policy curriculum and a Washington Fellows program. “It has been amazing to use all three,” he said.
“Other interns on the project have used their unique backgrounds to focus on women in Knoxville, Black families in Knoxville, and other critical components of the 1870s city,” Tuthill said. “We’re all working on the same project with the same resources and the same data, but each of us has a radically different role to play.”
Research and Presentation
Before the ETHS internship, Tuthill served as an undergraduate research assistant with a public policy and public affairs professor and a graduate student analyzing political platforms. “We developed a framework to help code qualitative elements of political platforms—like appeals-to-emotion, positivity, negativity—into quantitative variables that could be studied as patterns,” he said. “The lessons I learned about coding documents taught me how to create guides and templates for my fellow interns at ETHS who worked on the 1870 census project.”
As a first-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences, Tuthill’s English professor encouraged him to present his work from a course at UT’s Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement (EURēCA).
“My project studied the impact of America’s newspapers on MLK’s legacy, and it was my first foray into academic research and presentation,” he said. “To be honest, I really had no idea what I was doing, which is why I heartily recommend the experience to anyone who wants to sharpen their research and writing skills. I learned a lot at EUReCA, and as I designed my project, I realized that I was subconsciously holding my work to a much higher standard since it was going to be presented. This helped teach me the value of critically assessing your own work, draft after draft.”
The Story in History
When Tuthill was in elementary school, his parents gave him a book by Ellen Levine about the Danish Resistance during the Second World War. “The book is a well-detailed account of Danish hope, resistance, and the unbreakable spirit that allowed the little nation to protect thousands of its vulnerable Jews during Nazi occupation,” he said.
“Darkness over Denmark introduced me to the idea that writing history involved telling meaningful stories that speak to universal human experiences, failures, and virtues as much as it involved making arguments about the past,” Tuthill said. “I’ve loved history ever since I read that book.”
At UT he discovered a way to pair his passion for history with a new public affairs major through the Howard H. Baker Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, charting his own path to a rewarding career.
by Amy Beth Miller