Tag: authenticity

Pushing Interpretation Forward

On By kittycalashIn Events, History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy, Reenacting7 Comments

Dare I say progressing?

servant mannequin in 18th century room
That’s no ghost, that’s my kid

In the past decade, museums, particularly historic house museums, have been challenged to refresh and reinvent their interpretations and presentations. The most notable challenge has come from the Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums (AGHHM), and the Historic House Trust of New York’s executive director, Franklin Vagnone.

I re-read a number of Vagnone and Deborah Ryan’s papers recently (including this one), thinking not just about What Cheer Day in a historic house, but about reenacting, living history, and costumed interpretation.

To make a historic house museum (HHM) seem more inhabited and real takes a lot of stuff: clothes, dishes, shoes, stockings, toys— all the stuff that surrounds us now, but correct for the time of the HHM, and arranged in a plausible manner, not like a sitcom set, where chairs before a fireplace face the visitor and not the hearth.

Man with cards, glasses and pipe in 18th century room
Stuff makes a house

To a degree, this is set-dressing, but set-dressing for a still-life, or real life, if the habitation will be by costumed interpreters. It has to be accurate to be authentic, whether it’s a HHM or a living history event that is striving to create a moment, or series of moments, in time– immersive moments.

We cannot step into the past unless we believe the representation we’re seeing, and that’s true no matter where we are: that’s why fabric matters, sewing techniques matter, tent pins and kettles and canteens matter. The world is made up of tiny details that we do actually notice without even knowing it: we see more than we realize, faster than we think. We’ll trip on the different, and stop.

A variety of coats can tell a variety of stories
A variety of coats can tell a variety of stories

But what we want to do, as interpreters, is to have the visitor catch the right difference: not the one about which canteen and why, but the larger interpretive point. In one hypothetical example, wooden canteens are a way to talk about defense contracting and supplying the American army, just as over-dyed captured coats are a way to talk about the American Revolution as an international, and not just a civil, war.

An encampment is, in a way, a neighborhood of HHMs turned inside out, with each regiment a separate family within the larger neighborhood. Each regiment tells a story about itself and its history, and is a lens through which visitors see the larger story.

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That’s why accuracy matters: you don’t want to debunk Ye Olde Colonial craft in camp, or cotton-poly polonaises (poly-naises?) worn by purported women on the ration: you want to focus on the larger interpretive point. When not everyone plays by the same rules, it is better to focus on your own accuracy and authenticity and to ignore Ye Olde Annoyances.

Tell the larger story, the story of your own regiment’s people: that’s your interpretive goal.

What Cheer Day 2014 Gallery 2!

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, Museums, Reenacting, Thanks4 Comments

Think of this as the afternoon photos.

The fortune teller came!
She had many interesting things to tell Miss Sally Brown
And promised better fortunes and comforts to the maids
The mantua maker, surpris’d!
The fortune teller even told visitors’ fortunes
Miss Ruth Smith asked for advice on a new gown
The deliveryman arrived with an order wine an empty bottle and a full head
Mr Taber shared his fashion plates with visitors
News of a happy future for Sally and Carl
Caught sleeping!
Battledore and shuttlecock
Lawn games
Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown!
Mr Mason and wife Alice; Mr Herreshoff and fiancee Sally
The ensemble
Eliza!
Bonnet swapping
And, finally, all done.

What Cheer Day 2014 Gallery

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, Museums, Reenacting, Thanks3 Comments

An overview of the day, to begin with.

Our new maid, Eliza, greets the mantua maker
Mr Mason confers with his tailor, Mr Taber
Alice receives the mantua maker’s letter
Taking Mr Mason’s measure
It was a long night….
Mr Herreshoff arrives from New York
Mrs Brown and her sister, Miss Smith, entertain company
…and quiz Mr H
Visitors from New York meet the ladies and mantua maker
Mr Taber and Mrs Brown
Motherly love
Not, perhaps, as dissolute as he appears?
Miss Sally Brown and Mr H
Mr H and a visitor
Did the vegetable milk remove freckles? Esther is not certain.
Miss Brown and Mr H
Mr Young, our sometimes troublesome deliveryman
Mr Taber threads a needle

Authenticity Measur’d in Moments

On By kittycalashIn Events, Fail, History, Living History, Philosophy, Reenacting10 Comments
Chopping wood: it takes a lot to cook and to keep warm in 1799
Chopping wood: it takes a lot to cook and to keep warm in 1799

In the post-What Cheer Day aftermath, when I was very tired and two houses were very messed up, I started thinking about why I bothered with living history. What exactly is this thing, and why I do it? Those questions made me think about the very best moments I have had in this business of re-creating the past in cloth and smoke and time.

In no particular order:

1. Going up to the field at Coggeshall Farm to call the boys down to dinner after spending all day in the kitchen. I was desperate to get out, and finally knew first hand how limited women’s lives could be in the 18th century, especially non-elite women.

2. Running upstairs at the John Brown House with Eliza, giggling over a joke to be played on Mr Mason. I don’t know what Mr C thought of it but I felt twelve years old, silly, carefree and light. John Brown’s housekeeper surely never felt that way, but a naughty maid might have, and for an instant I knew what it was to have no responsibilities.

We didn’t even notice the background at the time

3. Chasing the Young Mr, a wayward apprentice, across the street; mobbing Mr Howard’s house; and arguing with the Stamp Inspector, all during the Stamp Act Protest in Newport It was not until I looked at the photos that I realized we really had been in front of a theatre, and that there were actual cars! A friend confirms that he, too, forgot about the cars, to the point of nearly being hit whilst running to Mr Howard’s house.

4. Assembling with a group of friends to take tea with Mrs Silsbee in Salem, sorting ourselves into a group on the sidewalk and venturing out, only to meet Mrs Silsbee on the street. That is the most Jane Austen/Mrs Gaskell I have ever felt. The wretched cobblestones do not count, as they were from the 20th century, but walking out on the wharf, and meeting a friend who brought an umbrella as the rain began was also very Austen-esque.

Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here
Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here

None of these are military events, and the majority of them happened this year, in past three months. I think this may be because we have been to fewer military events, and I expect the concentration is due, in part, to finally getting better at this practice. They are also site-specific, and trending toward first-person interpretation.

Coats
Those coats.

For reasons explained better by the NPS and in the excellent study of NPS-Reenactor relationships, no battle reenactment can ever capture the truth of the war it attempts to recreate, and that is true even when the battle takes place on the same site, at the same time of year, and even when soldiers are dressed in as-close-as-possible replicas of the uniforms worn at that battle, on that field, on that date, 236 years earlier, and no one has brought a spinning wheel or tent chandelier to camp.

I respect the notions of moveable monuments and performances as commemoration. I like military history, I like war memorials: there is not a competition between civilian and military reenactments. But military events have not yet had the power to transcend experience for me.

My best guess as to why military events are not transformative for me is that, to this point, the business remains too much like camping in funny clothes. As I experiment more with 18th century methods of cooking appropriate rations, and as I strip away the gear we carry into the field, the military events are better (as at Bennington). But I already know how limited women’s perspectives could be (see item 1), and while Bennington was instructive in how ridiculously different the experiences of men and women could be, the military events remain more instructive experiences for the men.

18th century camp
Domesticity in the Field

Why? Because the specificity of site plays out at those events in the battle, and not in the camp. The point at Bennington and at Saratoga and at Stony Point was to use the site as it had been used. The men experienced the landscape in ways as close as possible to what soldiers and militia had actually seen. And women stayed in camp and got smoke in their eyes, cut up vegetables, or washed clothes, which is pretty much what happens at any outdoor event where we can have a fire and, with differences in technology, is pretty much what I do when I get home from work every day.

All that leaves me wondering what to make of military events, and what I want to do in the coming year. No matter how much of this is “for the public,” it still has to be rewarding for the practitioner.