Coast to Coast

Of the 10 high school and college-aged participants, one student made the cross-country trek all the way from California to be part of the 2025 Living History Youth Summer Institute cohort and become its first West Coast participant.

Lila Perl is a junior history major at the University of California, San Diego and a Los Angeles native. While searching for history internships for the summer, she came across the Summer Institute application on Handshake, a platform dedicated to helping college students and recent college graduates find jobs and internships. Perl previously visited the Museum and recalled having great interactions with Museum staff. Learning that the Summer Institute would allow her to positively impact the visitor experience at the Museum while connecting with other students who are passionate about history, she decided to apply.

Perl was able to utilize her college studies in her work at the Museum. Specifically, she and the other students put the concept of lived experience — gaining knowledge and understanding of events and individuals through interpretive experiences to learn a more nuanced historical narrative — into practice over the course of six weeks. Particularly, Perl and the cohort focused on the stories of individuals like Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Till, William Lee, and James Forten.

“The people we study in the past — as well as us today — had joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams, and daily challenges that informed how they perceive the world and how we study this experience,” Perl said during the Summer Institute’s graduation ceremony. “During the Living History Youth Summer Institute, we’ve carried that concept of lived experience with us, along with historical empathy, to truly be able to tell these stories.”

During the capstone interpretation day at Clark Park, Perl chose to interpret the experiences of Harry Washington, a Black Loyalist and a man formerly enslaved by George Washington, and Boston King, also a Black Loyalist and formerly enslaved man.

“Both of these men chose to side with the British because they felt it was their best opportunity at finding freedom following the end of the Revolutionary War,” she said. “Especially because their perspectives are treated unfairly in the broader historical narrative, I’m grateful that I was able to humanize their lived experiences.”

Perl acknowledged the value of uplifting these stories that often go untold and pushing through the discomfort of researching and interpreting the history of people of African descent.

“These stories deserve to be told, and we can’t let anxiety hold us back. At the time of the American experiment, people had these lived experiences, and we can’t just forget about them,” Perl said.