2023 - Rachel Whitley
Rachel Whitley's 2023 Blurb & Blogs
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.
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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!
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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!
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