Paula Tarnapol Whitacre 

In the early 2000s, I responded to a posting in the local paper to conduct oral histories for the Office of Historic Alexandria. I spent time listening to long-time Black and White residents, newly arrived Ethiopian and Salvadoran immigrants, and others. I was amazed by what I did not know. There was a lot more to Alexandria’s past than its proximity to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate a few miles down the road.

Nineteenth-century history has always fascinated me, and I soon happily went down that rabbit hole. I read accounts that revealed the city’s outsized role in the domestic slave trade. I pored over Quartermaster maps to identify the current-day locations of Civil War hospitals. When I volunteered to transcribe the “Civil War years” of a diary kept by Julia Wilbur, a New York abolitionist who lived in Alexandria from 1862 to 1865, I was hooked.

In 2017, Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press published A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’s Struggle for Purpose, my biography of Wilbur, which followed her from central New York to Alexandria to her post-war life in Washington, DC as a government worker and suffragist. However, she traveled out of Alexandria during several months during the Civil War and left permanently in 1865.

I knew that many important pieces of Alexandria’s story still needed to be told. Hence, my current project with Alexandria itself as the “main character.”

Fortunately, I have lots of ways to hone my history knowledge and my writing chops. I represent my planning district on the Alexandria Archaeological Commission and am on the board of the Alexandria Historial Society. I’m a past board member of the Civil War Roundtable of Washington, DC, and currently serve on the Ed Bearss Award Committee. Graduate seminars in the History Department at George Mason University have been stimulating for someone who hasn’t sat in a classroom for a while. And I’m a member of some great formal (Author’s Guild, Biographers International Organizatiion) and informal writing groups.

In addition to my writing about history, I have worked as a freelance writer and editor for many years. Mostly, I take on projects for organizations and government agencies--web content, articles, reports, with lots on health, the environment, and education. (My company website is here.) With every assignment, I learn something new, whether it's the effects of climate change, how to run a successful healthcare practice, or new trends in education.

My bachelor's and master's degrees are in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. My first full-time job was at The Washington Post (as an editorial aide and a reporter-intern), then I was posted as a Foreign Service Officer in Costa Rica. After a year traveling with my husband in Asia, I returned to Washington and worked for a forestry organization and for an environmental education project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.