National Geographic’s Extreme Reenactor aired Thursday night and we watched with a kind of…intrigued horror.

It was a reality show with wool and black powder, and as much as the men boasted that they were getting as close as they could to experiences of the soldiers, they didn’t seem all that different from us in the Rev War reenactments. There’s a bottom line, a wall of time: you cannot re-create the past.

I can no more truly start a day over, go back downstairs and re-create the moment of making coffee this morning than I can re-create an 18^th century experience. There’s no way to truly re-live a moment or a feeling or an action. You’ll never get it exactly right—and that may in fact be the point.

We are always experimenting. Perhaps the best re-enactors are the ones continually seeking to polish their impressions, expand their knowledge, attempt something new. Maybe encouraging growth, renewal and on going research is more important than delineating the lines between the mainstream, the authentic, and the hardcore or progressive re-enactors.

That’s probably just the museum professional in me talking…

There’s an interesting, if slightly old, study of re-enactors done by the NPS that explores some of these questions for the RevWar time period.