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.

My name is Molly Graham, and I am a fourth-year student studying History and Government at the University of Virginia. This summer, I interned at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, the place where General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, signaling an end to the Civil War. As a Cultural Resources intern, I worked under both the curator and the historian at the park. Throughout my time at APCO (Appomattox’s official National Park System acronym), I learned a great deal about public history and conservation, all while partaking in the process myself.

This summer, I was one of five digital research interns at Virginia Humanities, and one of two coming from UVA. I was hired to conduct research for the Descendants Workshop, a part of the Virginia Black Public History Institute and the African-American Cultural Resources Task Force created by the General Assembly.

Working for Mount Vernon this summer is one of the experiences whose pivotal importance I recognized from the outset. I remember receiving the first email with the formal introduction and a very brief description of the projects I would be tackling: transcription & research. I had done both tasks before but I was aware they took on a different connotation since I would be working for the first time in a major institution such as Mount Vernon.

There is no finite amount of history. After spending a summer adding to the historical record, I have concluded that the only limits on it are what we are willing to learn. History itself will only ever expand. This summer, my responsibility was to contextualize and contribute to the local historical record, revealing shades of gray in some figures’ lives while highlighting other figures who had been forgotten or erased. I wrote more than fifty articles for Cvillepedia, Charlottesville’s hyperlocal online encyclopedia.

Before Major General William T. Sherman made his name as “Burnin’ Sherman,” the patriotic pyromaniac and terror of Georgia, he took out his over-the-top hostility on a smaller target: a newspaper reporter named Thomas Knox. Sherman was notoriously antagonistic towards the traveling correspondents that newspapers dispatched to the army.

This summer I spent twelve weeks at Manassas National Battlefield Park, learning the history of the park and battles and how to engage and interpret for visitors. When I applied for an internship through the Institute of Public History, I did not originally have Manassas as my first choice, preferring at the time an internship in a city I grew up in. That would have been a great experience, I’m sure, but my summer at Manassas NBP was exactly what I needed to take me out of my comfort zone and to show me just how many opportunities there are in history if I choose to pursue them.

After the Civil War, the University of Virginia and its alumni played a leading role in propagating the mythology of the Lost Cause. Determined to “vindicate the character of the South,” they defended secession, valorized Confederate soldiers, and declared the postwar experiment in biracial democracy a failure. Few alumni challenged this culture of Confederate orthodoxy, and even fewer openly defended Reconstruction. Among those who did, however, was Alexander Rives, an eccentric but fiercely principled Charlottesville jurist.