By Alem Alem, William & Mary Class of 2028, Preservation Virginia Communications and Marketing Summer Intern
As an upcoming College of William & Mary third year student, it has been my pleasure to have had the opportunity to help bridge the gap between the unknown and often overlooked aspects of Bacon’s Rebellion for this year’s Rediscovery series. I would not have had this experience this summer if it was not for the Cultural Heritage Immersion Program (CHIP) at William & Mary who funded my internship and partnered with Preservation Virginia. While a part of my position was to edit, style, and publish blogs written by the panelists from our events, I also created and uploaded posts and reels promoting the series on our Bacon’s Rebellion 350 social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook as well as post an interview with Pamunkey artist Ethan Brown on our website. Nonetheless, my main takeaway from interviewing, publishing blogs and reading lecturer’s research is this; Bacon knew what he was doing with the privileges he had.
Spanning women’s history, indigenous history, and socioeconomic status, this series has brought challenges to both my knowledge of the insurrection of 1676 and how to effectively market the events regarding the sensitive topics. It is not enough to insert any image or silhouette to decorate a post promoting an event around history without knowing what it would negatively imply. For that reason, creating the posts for our series this year has been a worthwhile and educational struggle as I practice ethics and inclusivity in the museum career field.
This also is the same for the scripts for the videos I made before filming for our social media pages. It goes to show that images and words should never be overlooked when bringing attention to historical events, especially this year for both America’s 250th anniversary and the 350th for Bacon’s Rebellion.
As I mentioned previously, some may know my name from the social media videos I have also made this summer. Though I work remotely, I would like to thank my Preservation Virginia supervisors Elyse Werling, Lydia Dodd, and Angel Johnson for assisting me with blog formatting, appropriate social media planning, and transporting me throughout Jamestown and Williamsburg to the lecture sites and answering all my tedious emails.
I would also like to include all our summer panelists for providing informative and genuinely interesting lectures for our series and communicating with me to showcase their research on our blog, Ethan Brown for allowing me to interview him on his piece “Mapping the Dragon”, and other Preservation Staff such as Mark Summers for being the first one to test my blog skills and Brenna Geraghty for assisting with editing blog drafts.
I hope everyone is able to take advantage of the blog submissions on the website and our uploaded videos of our events to see how history has played out and its similarities to today.
