24 LIVING HISTORY

David Dean

Living history is both a movement and a practice that seeks to simulate how lives were lived in the past by reenacting them in the present. The impulse to embody the past in the present through performance, re-storying the past through poetry, prose, drama, dance, music, or ritual, is a shared human experience, found in all cultures and at all times.

Similar nationalist, protectionist, and traditionalist impulses lay behind the formation of the first open air living history museums in North America.

Seeking to reenact past lives by practicing everyday activities, using first-person interac­tion with visitors, living history is a self-conscious attempt to represent past lives as they were actually lived. Although aware of the limits of historical knowledge and the inability to fully capture the experience of the dead through the simulations of the living, practitioners and advocates of living history often make claims that participating in these reenactments closes historical distance, enabling visitors to feel like they have stepped back in time (Anderson, 1984; Allison, 2016).

In his reflections on “resurrectionism,” British historian Raphael Samuel observed that living history assumes “events should be reenacted in such a way as to convey the lived experience of the past” (1994, p. 176). For most living history practitioners, this translates into the belief that in order to redo past lived experience authentically, a good deal of effort and attention must be paid to historical accuracy (authenticity). Performing in the first person is considered to be the pur­est way of achieving this goal and practitioners have been especially preoccupied with accuracy and authenticity, usually conflating the two or assuming that the first ensures that visitors will experience the second (Snow, 1993; Handler and Gable, 1997; Gapps, 2010).

First-person interpreters adopt a role, usually of a known person from the period and who has a certain relationship to the historic site.

The degree to which such living history performers have the freedom to deviate from scripts and training manuals varies (narrative). New insights into the working lives of interpreters have been a feature of recent scholarship on living history reenactment. Like many workers, interpreters play games to get them through the workday, but uniquely at living history sites, these focus on authenticity, with interpreters trying to outdo each other with the accuracy of their costumes, accessories, or actions. This playfulness can, however, turn into a Foucauldian world of self-discipline and surveillance, where autonomy, spontaneity, and unauthorized sce­narios are policed (Tyson, 2013) (play; gaming).

Researchers who have conducted interviews with reenactors at living history sites, or who have participated in reenactments themselves, have observed that the pursuit of historical accu­racy varies. All reenactors conduct research, or draw on research carried out by interpreta­tive planners, and focus their attention on getting the look of the past right. This is generally achieved by turning to original sources for information about appearance, materiality, and behavior. Yet, as Hander and Gable (1997) found at Plimouth Plantation, and Tyson (2013) at Historic Fort Snelling, sometimes manuals offered to living history trainees contain secondary sources—modern historian’s interpretations—without distinguishing them from period sources. In effect, living history interpreters enact scenarios in which archive and repertoire become entangled (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011) (archive).

When it comes to manufacturing clothing or accessories, some living history reenactors will insist on using only original materials and methods, while others will compromise as they see fit or as their own needs might require. Scholars of American Civil War reenactors uncov­ered tensions between “hardcore” reenactors—those who were willing to go to any extreme to capture perceived historical accuracy (such as using real blood or reshaping their bodies to mirror bloated corpses)—and “farbs”—reenactors able and willing to permit elements of their own contemporary lives to intrude in their performances of the recreated past (Horwitz, 1999; Schneider, 2011) (expertise and amateurism).

Visitors also have a role to play in this adventure in time travel: they are seen by interpret­ers as coming from another place concurrent with the time period, not from the future. The purpose of first-person interpretation is to capture the audience’s imagination, to make them feel as if they are witnessing everyday life as if they were really present in the past. Although on occasion visitors might engage in activities to be taught certain skills or assist with certain tasks, interactions between interpreters and visitors at sites that adopt first-person interpretation are generally verbal, usually taking the form of question and answer, and occasionally becoming conversational.

Through first-person interpretation, rendering historical accuracy as much as is possible in appropriate spaces, living history reenactment navigates historical distance by collapsing past and present. This past/present performance event is fixed in a specific time and space, performed by those who are committed to embodying the past through dress, language, gesture, and action. In seeking to replicate an original, reenactors are engaging in what per­formance studies scholars call “restored behaviour” (Schechner, 1985, pp. 7—35) in which the original is re-performed, not in quite the same way and never exactly replicating it, but in ways informed by repetition.

Historical distance is experienced differently in another performance strategy adopted by living history sites: third-person interpretation. Rather than playing a particular historical role, third-person interpreters act as informed guides to past lives lived. They may be situated in actual or reconstructed historical spaces, and they may be in period costume, but they are under no obligation to move, act, or speak in a time-bound fashion. They speak of the past using past tenses and are free to make observations about the past and engage fully with what happened between the past that is being represented and the current day shared by interpreter and visitor. Indeed, the point of third-person interpretation is to engage visitors in discussion about the similarities and differences between past and present, encouraging deeper critical thinking than is enabled by first-person interpretation. In third-person interpretation, living history as reenact­ment resonates with R. G. Collingwood’s well-known assertion in The Idea of History (1946) that all historians reenact past experience: they undo history by time traveling in their minds from their own present to the past they seek to understand.

Although living history reenactments most commonly take the form of either first- or third- person interpretation (and it is not unusual for the same site to use both strategies), they have always had an element of the hands-on, learning from doing through an approach known as sec­ond-person interpretation.

Figure 24.1 Screenshot from Follow the North Star, a participatory museum theater experience that recreates some of the conditions faced by fugitive slaves in Indiana as they sought freedom in the North, Conner Prairie, Indiana. Source: www.connerprairie.org/things-to-do/events/ follow-the-north-star.

environments, able to exercise a higher degree of historical agency, then there is considerable potential for achieving a greater degree of historical consciousness and historical understanding (Magelssen, 2007; Walvin, 2010).

There are many motivations that drive individuals and families to participate in living his­tory reenactments. Some play roles from the past or visit the past as a form of escapism from the present, a therapeutic response to the trials, tribulations, and traumas of daily life. As well as learning about the past and developing new skills, many of those interviewed by research­ers speak of living history permitting them to explore emotions and feelings that otherwise would be elusive. Others reference the satisfaction gained by indulging nostalgic urges, or that locating themselves in another time and space gives them a sense of belonging and com­munity (Braedder et al., 2017) (practices of reenactment). Some reenactors experience a deep connection between their contemporary lives and those they perform, as did members of marginalized groups in Paris performing communards in Peter Watkins’s 2000 historical drama La Commune (2001).

The ways in which living history reenactments negotiate historical distance, historical con­sciousness, and historical understanding are something they share with other forms of reenact­ment, be they formalized and carefully organized battle reenactments or the more informal cultural reenactments such as playing a medieval or Renaissance role as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (larp; battle; gaming). Living history is also found in historical real­ity television shows and historical simulation video games (gaming; documentary). What all these forms of living history share is a significant degree of theatricality, where it is not only the costumes, objects, and buildings that matter, but also the performers and performances themselves (performance and Performativity).

Further reading

Allison, D. B., 2016; Anderson, J., 1984; Braedder, A., Esmark, E., Kruse, T., Nielsen, C.T., and Warring, A., 2017; Johnson, K., 2015a; Magelssen, S., 2007; Schneider, R., 2011; Taylor, D., 2003; Tyson, A. M., 2013.