Short dramas were offered periodically to give a sense of family interactions that might have occurred. Walking tours of the changing neighborhood were encouraged. In my dreams I imagine an iconic, genuine structure, one where early arrivals lived in cities across the nation.

My only concern [/open pearl clutching] is that this will be the only form of history in the future. I am not sure public universities are committed to history or other humanistic disciplines unless they have a clear vocational purpose. If thats the case then we will only be teaching history in a form that is digestible by school teachers and public history specialists. The academic practice of history will shrink to meet the needs of a few R I’s and some tony private liberal arts colleges. [end pearl clutching/]

http://www.connerprairie.org/Plan-Your-Visit/Special-Events/Follow-the-North-Star.aspx

There’s a great popular book from the ’90′s on history, the American South, and Civil War re-enactments called “Confederates in the Attic.” To be sure, it’s all white people out there reenacting the Civil War; and it’s mainly doods of a certain variety. The best parts of the book were when the author tarried along on an overnight reenactment where the 15 or so members of a regiment slept on the ground and ALL SHARED THE SAME SINGLE WOOLEN BLANKET and vied for authenticity while eating moldy bacon. Good times in the 19th c.!

I’m not a historian, I’m a musician. Starting about fifty years ago there was a wave of “authentic” performances of Baroque and Renaissance music, followed, when the term “authentic” was challenged, by a hasty retreat to “historically informed performance practice;” Richard Taruskin argues, persuasively I think, that the aesthetic is actually Modernist, and I’d go further to say that unless we can recreate the Baroque audience, complete with its Baroque ideas and beliefs and experiences, we need to make even HIPP claims with caution.

So I’m surprised that such explosive material as slavery and genocide, and how to incorporate them in more or less “authentic” re-enactments, should be treated with what strikes me as casualness. I think sleeping in a slave cabin, like sitting in the electric chair at Huntsville Prison in Texas (yes, you can do this–bring the kids!), is both irredeemably false and offensively trivializing.

I’ve seen the nostalgia trap that Meaghan mentioned, and while there’s varying degrees of it everywhere, part of the concern is marketability, and not just of the nik-naks kind. At one of the more authentic sites I worked for, we were thinking about staging a public execution, but the administration was concerned that it would hurt the site’s reputation for family-friendliness. We considered carding (ie, this part of the site is R rated) but it ultimately got nixed. Even the most authenticity-conscious sites have budgets to think about. All the places I worked were very concerned with balancing authenticity with number of visitors attracted.

Reenactment is a way of reminding us all that history was in fact embodied. Though the selective amnesia is amazing.