NIAHD Interns at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania

Student Profile 

My name is Keira Hogan. I’m a history major entering my junior year at William & Mary and a proud alum of the 2022 NIAHD Pre-College Program in American History. I am also an anthropology minor, and I hope to attend law school in the future. On campus, I am the secretary of the History Club, a member of the Gamma Phi Beta chapter, and a guide for the Spotswood Society. I also participate in the VOX club, and I am looking to join the College Company, our campus reenactment group! I’ve been working as an intern at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for a few weeks now and I am having a great time. The park includes four Civil War battlefields—Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania; a visitor center located at the Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg battlefields; Chatham, an eighteenth-century plantation house on the north side of the Rappahannock River; and the General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson death site at Ellwood, an eighteenth-century plantation on the Wilderness Battlefield. I have been working with the rangers to develop my own interpretive program on the Battle of Fredericksburg. I have enjoyed focusing on social histories during the Civil War, especially by looking at women’s perspectives of the battles. It has been enlightening to work in the public history field with the National Park Service and definitely something I’d be interested in turning into a career. I am so grateful to NIAHD for helping me get this opportunity, and I can’t wait to see this year’s Pre-College students when they come to visit the park.

July Blog

My internship started with two weeks of training from the park’s interpretive rangers, who toured us around the different sites and gave us their programs. These weeks were overwhelming and hectic as I memorized dates, facts, and stories, but they were also exciting. I really enjoyed getting to know my fellow interns, and we became fast friends. The rangers were all super kind and supportive, and very understanding that learning all the information was going to be difficult at first.

After training, it was time to begin writing my own tour program. I chose to focus on the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg. Though the overarching goal of the tours we developed was to educate visitors on the battle, the rangers also asked us to create an essential question to guide our research, almost like a thesis statement. I have always been passionate about women’s history, so I chose to focus on what women did during the battle. This was a challenge considering many historians have solely focused on what some call “Great Man” history, wherein historical events are said to be caused by or revolve around important (usually male) figures. In this case, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate General Robert E. Lee come to mind. When it comes to Civil War history, many books and programs have been devoted to these figures, while others, such as women or the enslaved, are often left in the footnotes. The rangers helped me to find diary entries and newspaper clippings to dig deeply into the lives of women who experienced the Battle of Fredericksburg firsthand.

At first, I struggled with writing a nuanced program, as many primary sources only mentioned White southern women. With the help of my supervisor, I was able to find a quote from an enslaved woman, who professed to her enslaver that despite the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg, she knew the war would set her free. This also allowed me to tackle potentially controversial topics, such as how the legacy of the Confederacy is remembered in America. Especially in the wake of the large-scale protests of 2020, many visitors can get fired up about what they believe to be an attack on their heritage. One of the most valuable things I learned over these first few weeks of my internship was how to handle these difficult conversations. Overall, though, most visitors are kind and open to learning whether they have little knowledge of the Civil War or they literally wrote the book.

I also was able to help guide this summer’s Pre-College students around our park, which was truly a full-circle moment! It was very rewarding to be able to talk to them and hopefully help inspire them to continue with public history. I am so excited for all that is yet to come with this opportunity!

August Blog

Finishing my internship at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park has been bittersweet. I am sad to be leaving because I truly had such an amazing experience in this position. All the people I worked with have been so wonderful and supportive, and I feel I have gained so much firsthand knowledge about working in the field of public history.

After I finished writing my program, I got to start giving tours to visitors, and it felt good to hear them clap at the end, knowing all the work I had done to make the tour informative and engaging paid off. I was also given the opportunity to start another project after I was done with this work. I chose to transcribe a court document from the 1850s, which will then be added to park records. It is much harder than I thought it would be to parse the old handwriting, but I am slowly making progress! I’ve found that despite my Luddite-tendencies, AI transcription programs can be very helpful when I get stuck on a certain phrase. It is nice to see what other components go in to working in public history.

On another note, we recently got the opportunity to participate in living history; that is, to dress in the style of a particular historical period. Often, first-person interpretation can go along with living history. This is what is done in Colonial Williamsburg, where an interpreter portrays a specific person, such as George Washington or Martha Washington. However, at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania we opted to represent the appearance and experiences of a typical person instead of depicting a particular person from the past. For example, one of my coworkers often wore his USCT (United States Colored Troop) uniform, to give visitors an idea of what a USCT soldier may have looked like, without claiming to be a Union soldier. This is just one of many memories that I will carry with me from this internship, as well as lessons learned that will help me in a future career.  I am so grateful to NIAHD and the National Park Service for the opportunity. I can’t wait to go back and visit someday!

Student Profile

Hello, my name is Rachel Whitley. I am majoring in history, and I am also president of the William & Mary Heritage Dancers, a College Company member, and avid therapy corgi fan! I am originally from the Fredericksburg area, and I am excited to participate in an internship that can teach me more about my hometown! During the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park Internship, I will be working at two sites, a battlefield and a plantation manor. I will also be participating in living history at the parks. I am excited to engage with a period I rarely work in, as well as get first-hand experience with the National Park Service. I am also eager to take on the challenge of interpreting Civil War sites to the public, since they can be very controversial. I hope to learn more about creating accessible and interesting historic talks, and how the narratives of the past shape our present.

July Blog

My internship with the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Parks began in late May with two weeks of training. This training included lessons on how to interpret historic battlefields to the public, how to de-escalate volatile situations, and a guided tour from the rangers of all the sites the park operates. These sites included the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness and Spotsylvania, as well as Chatham Manor, Ellwood Manor, Stonewall Jackson’s Death Site, and the Historic Salem Church. We were also given a walking tour of Historic Downtown Fredericksburg itself. Since I am originally from Fredericksburg, I knew some of the content already, but the rangers added poignant interpretive notes in their tours and talked about why certain things were preserved while others were not. They also covered common myths about the battles and the Civil War as a whole. I found debunking the myths and discussing collective memory super helpful, as well as the de-escalation training! Little did I know how quickly I would need it once the training was complete. All Civil War sites are relatively contentious, but it didn’t occur to me just how inflamed people could become about certain historic narratives. I in particular worked at the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor’s Center and Chatham Manor, so I don’t think I received as many tough visitors as the interns at Stonewall Jackson’s Death site or Chancellorsville might have. Other than the occasional challenging guest, my interactions with visitors were pretty positive. Many were of older generations and were delighted with my interest in history as a younger person, so they were often very fun to talk to. My interactions with the rangers and other interns were also positive! Everyone was very supportive and helpful, and very interested in history, so they were more than happy to share information and sources. This was particularly helpful when we began research for small projects around mid-June. One of the first projects I received during my internship was to write a short, twenty minute talking program about Fredericksburg during the Civil War. Since the topics I could potentially cover in this program included a wide range, writing the program was pretty daunting at first. I eventually settled on the reorganization of the Medical Department of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. This was a topic that I didn’t know a lot about, but the rangers were more than willing to help me find sources and workshop the program so I could be comfortable giving it to guests. Both my program talks and internship have been going great so far!

August Blog

At the end of July, I was assigned a new project, which was to research and create reference material for a painting of Chatham Manor. The painting is intended to be on the cover of the new Junior Ranger book for Chatham, since right now there are only Junior Ranger books and patches for the battlefields at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania. I found this project to be particularly challenging because I wasn’t sure how much research needed to be done. It was hard to get a sense of how much a layperson like the artist would need for this project. Sometimes it can be hard to remove oneself from the historian mindset. I also felt anxious about making sure to have enough material to justify the amount of time I spent on the research.

In addition to that project, during the last few weeks of the internship, I was assigned to sort through and supplement the wayside evaluations. Throughout the summer, other interns at the park had been assigned to travel to the signs at different parts of the battlefield and write evaluations of their content and the condition of the signs themselves. My task was to sort all those evaluations by location in the park and issue with the sign. However, a few of the signs were accidentally missed, so I went to go find and evaluate the missing signs. One of the signs I could not locate at all, and I walked all over the Fredericksburg Battlefield and part of downtown Fredericksburg! Looking back on it, that incident is pretty funny, but at the time I was very frustrated. I only managed to check five more missing signs, since it takes a while to travel from site to site. It can take twenty to twenty-five minutes depending on the traffic, and the traffic around Fredericksburg is always bad. Not only that, but about two hours before the workday ended, I was called back by the head of interpretation, since there was a series of severe storms with tornado watches heading in our direction. So, although I didn’t manage to find all the missing signs, I located five of these signs, and I sorted them all.

All in all, I had a really good time as an intern with the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. It was nice to learn more about my hometown, and learning the Federal regulations for the interpretation of sensitive subjects will really help with any future historical interpretation I do. All the rangers were very kind and professional, and I think I learned a lot about work at a large historic site!

July Blog

After spending a little over a month training and working at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, it’s safe to say I know a lot more about the Civil War now than I did at the beginning of May. My internship at the Park started with a little over two weeks of training, where my fellow interns and I learned about the National Park Service, met all of the staff with whom we would be working, went on tours of each battlefield and historic site in the Park (there are six total), and had a crash course on all things historical interpretation.  This training was helpful because it prepared us for pretty much any situation we might face while on the job, while also giving us a great base of knowledge about the places we would be working. At the two locations I work, Fredericksburg Battlefield and Chatham Manor, my daily interactions with visitors have been really positive. I’ve given a few walking tours, answered lots of different questions, and helped people become interested in the sites they’re visiting. Most of the information I know is thanks to training, as well as some supplemental reading I’ve been doing on the side. Overall my internship has gotten off to a great start and I’m really looking forward the coming weeks.

August Blog

My internship at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park was an amazing experience. During the internship I had a lot of rewarding firsts, none more exciting than the first guided tour I gave at Fredericksburg Battlefield. I was so nervous to speak in front of visitors, but it turned out great and I realized I actually really liked giving tours and speaking in public. At the end of my three months in Fredericksburg, I not only gained experience from learning and working at different historical sites such as the Fredericksburg Battlefield and Chatham Manor (an 18^th century plantation house), but I also met and became friends with other interns who were just as passionate about history as I was, and with Park Interpreters who taught me so much and were amazing to work alongside. This internship showed me how much I love history and how much I enjoy teaching history to all ages, from visitors who have never been to a Civil War Park before to those who are already experts.