Tags
authenticity, common people, common soldier, history, interpretation, living history, Reenacting
You know what’s wrong with most reenactments and living history events?
They’re not actual days. They’re fragments of many days jammed together like a fractured mosaic.
It’s tough and tiring to imagine and script and play out a whole day—all the simultaneous pieces—but if living history or reenacting events were run as A Day In Time, there would more likely be:
• Roles for More [kinds of] People
• Contextualization of Events
• Boring Bits like Paper Work
• No Time for Spinning
• Moar Drilling
• Rations & Messes, Actually
• Moar Drilling
• Courts Martial
• Small Acts of Drama Amid the Quotidian
Of course, y’all would have to work together…but imagine the power if an entire event ran the way a military camp should be, would have been, run. Orderly books provide plenty of ideas, entire days of stuff to do and get in trouble for.
Stop splitting, start lumping, and these events will, at last, become truly engaging on both sides of the rope line.
Kitty Calash 
With one of my camp groups (4th to 6th graders) we did a “day in the life” activity where we brainstormed what a day in the life of a particular person would have been. It clicked so well with those kids, I’ve wanted to use it as an assignment/activity with older students and adults. For the adults, I see it as a precursor to event development.
This is one of the things I love best about What Cheer Day at the John Brown House, the way the “day in the life” set up allows the quotidian and the life-changing to intertwine in messy ways that feel very real.
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