Thinking about Experiential History: Reenactments, 'Living History', and Pagents

Note: This is another post from the teaching assistant. I was thinking about the projects and happened to spy Nelles' book on my shelf (it's a good read if you get the chance!) and spun off from there. I know I had promised a few groups a post on land rights and aboriginal history in museums, from an Australian angle, but I may hold off that until the next project.

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Historical reenactments were (and in some communities, are) an important form of group remembrance. In the United States to this day groups reenact battles from their civil war and the annual Riverfest in Lindsay Ontario often includes a camp of men and women reenacting the lives of soldiers during the War of 1812. (Not so surprisingly, no link for this one. But trust me, as a little kid I thought this was the best part!)

Similarly, historical plays (such as Unity, 1918 that looks back at life on the Prairie after the First World War and during the outbreaks of Spanish Influenza), living history sites (such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virigina, Old Fort Henry, in Kingston, Louisbourg, Cape Breton, and various pioneer villages), and festivals (such as the Robin Hood Festival in Nottingham Forest) offer viewers a chance to relive, or at least watch people pretend to relive, the experience of our predecessors--both real and imagined.

Unlike with movies and other media, the living history exhibition, plays, and reenactments allow the past to be represented in space and time. That is, when one visits the Lock Keeper's house and blacksmith shop at Jones Falls in the Rideau Canal system it is possible to interact with history by physically experiencing the spaces in which others lived, set up as they lived it, with guides or interpreters dressed and, in some cases, living as if they were from the time period being represented.

In many ways this can feel like walking back into time, or at least that is the idea behind the genre. At the same time, however, by refusing to move forward in time and circumstance, by always being a 1812 soldiers' camp, these exhibitions freeze time in space and get caught up in a kind of cyclical time where the past is always here and now.

How do we, as historians, write about these spaces of representation? What does one have to keep in mind when exploring the reenactments at Louisbourg or Fort Ticondaroga (New York State)? Further, how do we get at the experiences of audiences who attended these exhibitions in the past, especially if they no longer exist?

H.V. Nelles' most recent book, The Art of Nation Building, examines the 1908 Québec tercentary from the view point of organizers, politicians (including Lord Grey, the Governor-General, and, to a lesser extent, the Prince of Wales), participants, and visitors. What was striking about the tercentary, for the purposes of this post, was that it included a historical pageant with a cast of thousands as well as a "historical" native village.

By exploring each layer of experience (and by no means exhausting them), Nelles provides historians, and especially Public Historians, with a series of vivid accounts of life in Québec City just over one hundred years ago. As the title suggests, he was concerned with how the event was used to promote the imagination of a Canadian nation--whether Québecois or as an integral part of the British Empire--and how those who physically participated in the reenactments, or witnessed characters from their past stroll through the streets, felt about the act of 'reliving' the past.

My purpose with this post is not to come to any firm conclusions, but to open up a potential genre of representation that was not mentioned in any of the group meetings last week. Feel free to add any comments or suggestions or other such 'sites of memory' (not used in the sense of Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire--I couldn't find an English wiki page, here's a translation of the book) that could help other groups.

A closing point, the special characteristic of this genre (only partially including plays, which are in someways closer to movies but in other ways not so much) is that the past is being replayed in an interactive environment intricately connected to the space in which past events occurred. It allows us, as historians, to think of the past both in terms of social experiences and in terms of spatial relationships--instead of merely as events.