The seventy-five square miles that comprise the Wilderness guided a heavy hand over three of the four years of America’s Civil War. Between 1862 and 1864, turmoil was commonplace from the banks of the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, west to Wilderness Tavern, and beyond. The battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Courthouse resulted in more than one-hundred thousand casualties. Thousands of young men were ripped from the Earth, the mortality of mankind soberingly looming long after the last shots of these battles had been fired.

This summer was an atypical one. I decided to take a unique opportunity to receive some direct experience with my major. After my second year at UVA, I spent the summer working as an intern at Antietam National Battlefield. It was an unusual summer for the park, as they were finishing an $8 million renovation to update their visitor center, forcing all their operations into a temporary visitor center for most of my time there.

Histories and memories of the Civil War often exclude the region of Southwest Virginia, including my hometown of Roanoke. Because many of the war’s most significant battles occurred in Northern Virginia and around Richmond, the lack of emphasis historians place on Southwest Virginia is unsurprising. Many residents, however, still celebrate their Confederate history with pride. Some tout Confederate flags in their homes, on their trucks, and on their clothing, repeating the phrase “it’s my ancestry” to those who take offense.

On November 9, 1870, at the height of Congressional Reconstruction, two Black lawmen marched at the head of a column of freedpeople in Donalsonville, Louisiana, in an effort to protect their newly won citizenship rights. They had mustered in a veritable battalion of formerly enslaved sugar workers to recover ballot boxes stolen by a coalition of white Democrats and conservatives and stashed in the Ascension Parish courthouse.

Imagine being given a box of family letters and Civil War artifacts that had been stored for decades in a Florida attic. How would you transform this valuable but long-neglected collection of loose, unsorted letters into archived documents, transcribed text, and data? This was the challenge I faced in Fall 2020. The box contained the private correspondence of Rev. John W.

On March 5, 1863, a contingent of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry gathered with prominent abolitionists at Tremont Temple in Boston to celebrate Black heroism. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had opened the door to the enlistment of African Americans just two months prior, but the festivities did not center on Black Union soldiers.

My name is Kaity Wasinger, and I am a fourth-year student majoring in American Studies and Art History at UVA. This summer, I traveled way down south to Vicksburg, Mississippi where I worked with the Interpretation Division at Vicksburg National Military Park. This 2,000 acre battlefield park contains more than 1,300 monuments and markers that tell some of the many stories of the Vicksburg Campaign. Although it was far away from my Virginia home, and far away from my typical field of studies, my time in Mississippi was filled with new experiences.

The last few months at Manassas National Battlefield Park have been educational, inspirational, and quite simply, a lot of fun. I am grateful to the Nau Center for providing this opportunity because it allowed me to apply the skills I learned in graduate school in a very different context—that of public history. The core skillset is universal: absorb primary and secondary sources and then convince an audience why it is important to their lives.

My name is Kasey Kiefer, and I am a fourth-year student pursuing a double major in History and Global Environments & Sustainability here at UVA. This summer, I had the privilege of working as a Cultural Resources Intern at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, the site of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant, which marked the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. My experiences at Appomattox this summer taught me invaluable lessons about working in public history and instilled in me a passion for the field.