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.

Because of their crucial role in the ranks and their symbolic value to the home front, Union drummer boys were essential to maintaining the northern war effort. These twelve to seventeen year-old boys served the Union in two major ways: practically and symbolically. Field drummers operated as one of the principal mechanisms for communication in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield. Although this role may seem obvious, their responsibilities were hardly confined to beating a drum. Drummers participated in a range of duties.

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.

This summer, I was a Nau Center intern at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where I received training in historical interpretation. The park includes the Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Civil War battlefields and two other historical sites: the Stonewall Jackson Death Site and Chatham Manor. As a result, interpretation at the park covers a wide range of time periods and topics, so I learned how to interpret in a variety of contexts.

Any moviegoer who has seen The Northman over the past month probably remembers the many animal motifs in the film. That’s true even if you’ve only seen the trailer, which includes ravens flocking to a misty island ruled by King Aurvandill War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) and a roaring Amleth the Bear-Wolf (Alexander Skarsgård) donning a snarling wolf pelt.

In October 1874, as Congressional Reconstruction tottered and its fate hung in the balance, Democrat and former Confederate general John Morgan exulted over the coming gubernatorial election in Alabama. “A great and mighty army,” he predicted, “marching beneath the white banner, and white to the core, is coming from the mountains to our relief.”[1] Many of those mountain men, Morgan knew, were former Union soldiers hailing from the state’s once anti-secessionist northern counties.