The Gettysburg Compiler

Pohanka Reflection: Sean Hough on Manassas National Battlefield Park

This post is part of a series on the experiences of our Pohanka Interns at various historic sites working on the front lines of history as interpreters and curators. Dr. Jill Titus explains the questions our students are engaging with here.

After working at the Manassas National Battlefield Park for about a month, I can readily accept the findings laid out in Thelen and Rosenzweig’s survey without any surprise. Having the opportunity to work the information desk, give guided tours, and conduct research for various purposes has given me the privilege to see how excited the general public is about history. The various forms through which people interact with the past at Manassas include instruction through our guided tours, the museum, the hourly movie, or the junior ranger program; individual learning or self-discovery through self-guided tours; physical interaction through firing demonstrations and hands on exhibits such as the artillery display; and ancestral research.

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Pohanka Reflection: Megan McNish at FredSpot

By Megan McNish ‘16

For many people, the past can be a murky thing. As historians and interpreters, it is our challenge to connect people with a past that they may or may not understand. Some visitors to historic sites come in with their own connections, but for those who don’t, we’re responsible to make that connection for them. In my second summer as an interpreter for the National Park Service, I’ve discovered that most people connect best when we tell stories. Visitors often don’t care about troop movements on a map, unless they are tracing the story of an ancestor. What people crave, what we as humans crave, is a story. As interpreters, it’s easy to reel people in with individual stories, but more difficult to connect them to a broader historical narrative.

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Pohanka Reflection: Rebecca Duffy on Petersburg National Battlefield

By Rebecca Duffy ’16

On the morning of the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Opening Assaults at Petersburg, I carefully watched all that was happening. While there was plenty going on – children’s activities, cannon demonstrations and a camp of re-enactors – one tent seemed to constantly have a steady stream of visitors who all spent a significant amount of time there before moving on. The tent that was so popular was the archeology one. Visitors put on clean white gloves and examined bits of pottery, fragments of metal and dropped bullets neatly organized in trays indicating the area in which each was found. As an intern in Resource Management, the department which predominately deals with the preservation and conservation of the park’s cultural and natural resources, I, of course, am partial to archeology, but what was it that was entrancing all these visitors? So I got to thinking about why I love my own job.

Studies by historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan indicate that many of us prefer a history which is directly pertinent to us, one we can grasp, and therefore humanize within a framework we are already familiar with: the stories of our families, the history of our communities and our own personal past. When we lack that sort of direct connection, artifacts can help build it for us. By sketching out a familiar context they can bring a story which may seem impossible to imagine close to us.

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Pohanka Reflection: Stratford Hall Plantation

By Abby Rolland ‘15

Reflecting on my time so far at Stratford Hall Plantation, I have realized that objects, and not just guides, offer interpretation to visitors. Yes, the docents have a wealth of knowledge about the house, but they cannot reveal every single piece of information about the rooms in the Great House. In order to fully understand the comings and goings of the Lee family, the placement of the objects must tell part of the tale.

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Pohanka Reflections: Meg Sutter on FredSpot

By Meg Sutter ’16

In the six weeks that I have been interning at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, affectionately known as FredSpot, I have not only grown personally in my knowledge of the Civil War but have also gained a further appreciation for the National Park and for my own role as a public historian. If nothing else, my internship here at FredSpot has reassured me of the public’s appreciation for history. Whether it be a visitor following an ancestor who fought in the Civil War or someone who just “saw the brown sign” and decided to stop in, many of the people visiting the park are really encouraging and enthusiastic individuals interested in their nation’s history. We also get a lot of foreign visitors who are captivated by a war fought by brother against brother. While some of my findings at FredSpot ring true with Rosenzweig and Thelen’s research, I feel we should give more credit to those individuals who visit Civil War sites not on a personal hunt for ancestors but just because the Civil War fascinates them.

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Pohanka Reflection: Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park

By Emma Murphy ‘15

The beauty of working at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania is the opportunity it offers to engage visitors on four different historical fronts. 1862 demonstrates the slow shift to hard war as the battle of Fredericksburg provokes political change in the war with the Emancipation Proclamation and increased destruction of private property. Chancellorsville demonstrates changing mentality on part of the commanders, making 1863 the year of taking unprecedented risk. Throughout 1864, the war rages on with bloody carnage and stalemate at both the battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House as trench warfare foreshadows the grim future of combat. With this opportunity comes an interpretive challenge, both for me as the interpreter and for the visitors themselves. How can visitors relate or connect to the twenty-two hour blood bath at the Bloody Angle? Should we attempt to answer their questions of humanity while we tell stories of destruction?

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Pohanka Reflection: Antietam National Battlefield

By Thomas Nank ‘16

My experiences at Antietam National Battlefield over the past four weeks resonate consistently with two points in the 1994 survey conducted by David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, but raise some questions about a third. My unscientific observations of the people who come through the Visitor Center at the battlefield lead me to conclude that many visitors are linked to the past through familial connections, and that most visit the park to connect with American history. I find little evidence, however, that African-American visitors find a deep connection to their ethnic past through the story of what happened at Antietam in the fall of 1862.

The author interpreting.

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Pohanka Reflection: Special Collections & Archives, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

By Bryan Caswell ’15

The reading room of Gettysburg College’s Special Collections is one of those singular spaces where the denizens of academe encounter the uninitiated yet insatiably curious members of that nebulous group known as the public. Indeed, many summer afternoons on the fourth floor of Musselman Library witness researchers diligently pouring over primary source material and rare books while intrigued visitors study the numerous displays of artifacts with equal dedication. While my duties in Special Collections are mostly confined to working with the collections themselves, I have upon occasion received the opportunity to observe our visitors as they interact with the history that is on display.

The author in his habitat. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

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Pohanka Reflection: Boston African American National Historic Site

By Melanie Fernandes ‘16

My time at Boston African American National Historic Site, though brief, has given me new insight on how people view history. Right off the bat, it’s quite clear that within a city with a near-record number of historic properties, Boston African American National Historic Site is a smaller and less well-known historic site than many of its neighbors. While the park is affiliated with many other neighboring sites, it has its own unique mission: to preserve and promote the history of the African American struggle, both in the city and on a national scale, particularly during the time leading up to and through the Civil War. This is obviously a lesser-known history than that of the revolutionaries Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, but it is arguably no less interesting or significant.

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Pohanka Intern Reflection: Richmond National Battlefield Park

By Tyler Leard ’16

A few days ago, I was working the desk at the Cold Harbor Visitor Center when a burly man with a goatee walked through the door. Approaching the desk, he told us in a thick southern accent that he was looking for an ancestor who had fought at Cold Harbor 150 years earlier. He believed his ancestor had been wounded and taken to a hospital in Richmond. He told us that several days earlier a ranger had assured him his ancestor would have been hauled into Richmond on a railroad, not a wagon, as he had previously feared. He was looking for confirmation of this. “I want to make sure that I can tell my mother that he didn’t suffer, that they didn’t haul him all the way in on a wagon,” he explained.

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