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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: commemoration

Massacres and Mondays

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by kittycalash in Events, History, Living History, Museums, Reenacting, Research

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Tags

authenticity, Boston, Boston Massacre, Bostonian Society, commemoration, interpretation, living history, Massachusetts, Research

March 5, 1770: Sound familiar? The Boston Massacre.

Happened on a Monday, by the way: how ironic is that?

But here’s the thing: if the Monday is emphasized, the Massacre stands out. Focusing on the normal makes the unusual ever much more so. And in the case of Monday, March 5, 1770, the usual is actually unusual.

Paul Revere, “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street, March 5, 1770.” Boston, 1770

Over the course of the month leading up to Saturday’s event, Drunk Tailor and I spent a lot of time talking about the night watch, peddling, food supplies to Boston, population, and what I might call “the texture of everyday life” in a meeting at work. Any reading you do forces you to realize that the key to the Massacre is how very abnormal everyday life had become in Boston that winter.

Edward Langford, disaffected nightwatchman. Boston Str

Edward Langford, disaffected nightwatchman. @BostonStrolls on Twitter

By 1770, Boston was an occupied city: Ferguson comes to mind, or Ramadi. Soldiers and watchmen patrol the streets, civil and martial structures clash, and the Sons of Liberty chafe under this control– or attempt at control. Scuffles, fights, brawls, break out. A boy is shot to death– accidentally– and tensions mount higher.  Sailors and soldiers alike commit acts of vandalism. Women are assaulted. Normal isn’t normal anymore, and Boston was always expensive to live in. Even in a city occupied by “friendly” forces, gathering supplies and going about one’s daily business became harder.

People are scared. This is a tense city. Lots of people are just trying to survive. Lots of those people are children. Roughly 16,000 people, and if the estimates are correct, 2,000 soldiers and 4,000 men (white, African, other, free, indented and enslaved), which means about 4,000 women and 8,000 children under 16. Let that one sink in: lots of children, lots of teenagers. I don’t know about you, but a city with a large population of teenagers is going to be tense under the best of circumstances, even in an era before the rise of youth culture. Hormones, man. The kid can’t help it.

So imagine this: instead of a mobile monument and a commemorative ritual that substitutes fists for muskets, the Massacre commemoration expands to include the day, and not just the night. Monday and a Massacre.

Townspeople hurry home as dark falls. Women lug laundry back to customers or to the washhouse, or trundle barrows home, empty, after a day of hawking cats’ meat, oysters, or fish. Tired cordwainers trudge the streets, hoping for meat at supper. A mother scavenges firewood to warm her rented rooms, keeping an eye out for the watch. Those are not Mr Hutchinson’s fence posts, truly.

Photo by Tommy Tringale (Claus' Rangers, 2nd NH, 3rdMA and HMS Somerset)

Photo by Tommy Tringale (Claus’ Rangers, 2nd NH, 3rdMA and HMS Somerset)

Women look over their shoulders, nervous at the sound of hobnailed shoes on the streets. Older men skirt closer to buildings, out of the way of soldiers in the street. Apprentices mock an officer, a sentry responds.

Insults, a scuffle, a boy knocked down. A mob, soldiers, a woman shoved, shots fired, men killed and wounded, blood on the snow.

Murder in the midst of the mundane. More horrifying (in truth, I have never heard Boston so silent as I did on Saturday night) within its context than set apart.

The Women of the 2017 Boston Massacre commemoration. Photo by Drunk Tailor at the behest of Our Girl History

The Women of the 2017 Boston Massacre commemoration. Photo by Drunk Tailor at the behest of Our Girl History

The benefits?
A more complete picture of life in 1770 that puts the events of the evening of March 5, 1770 into deeper context and thus a sharper contrast.
A recognition that history isn’t just about men and conflict.
Understanding that what made living under occupation so hard was more the living– trying to be normal–than the occupation.
And, yes: more for women to do.

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Washington Memorialized

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by kittycalash in History, Museums

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

commemoration, embroidery, George Washington, memorials, samplers

An Indian Mourning Washington, Chinese School ca. 1799. American Museum in Britain, 58.124

Today marks the 214th anniversary of the death of George Washington, memorialized here in a Chinese reverse-on-glass painting. I suspect that the figure of the Indian personifies the North American continent rather than the actual tribes, given Washington’s role in the French and Indian war, but that’s only a guess.

Lucy Child, 1800. RIHS Museum Collection, 1922.4.1

Washington was memorialized in Rhode Island as he was everywhere else, with eulogies and speeches, and letter of condolence to his widow, who wrote back to four young ladies of Providence, enclosing a lock of hair.

Memorial samplers and embroidered pictures were popular projects for girls and young women in 1799, and the RIHS Collection holds a [sadly worn] tribute to Washington.

Fortunately, the National Society of Colonial Dames of America holds a sampler with the same text, made in 1803.

Columbia’s fair daughters forever shall / mourn While genius stands weeping at / Washington’s Urn. Let hope still support / you Fair daughters arise. In faith that your / Washington’s soard to the skies. Where / still as your guardian he’ll ever preside. / To virtue and goodness the Polestar and / guide.

They just don’t write poetry quite like that anymore.

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Requiems and Reenactments

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by kittycalash in Events, Living History, Reenacting

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

battles, commemoration, discussion, living history, Patriots Day 2013, Reenacting, Revolutionary War

Warning: Long reenactor-heavy content ahead.

Evan McGlinn for the NY Times. Click for slide show.

Evan McGlinn for the NY Times. Click for slide show.

My friend wrote on Tuesday about battle reenactments, and whether or not they’re appropriate or even, well, decent, in a way; she has been thinking about the Battle Road event, Patriots Day, and the Battle at Lexington Green in light of the explosions at the Boston Marathon.

She helped me remember the reading and thinking I had done this past fall when people at work asked if reenactments (and even museum exhibitions) glorified war, and when I started to wonder why, exactly, I was in this hobby. I read Vanessa Agnew on “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present” in Rethinking History 11:3, 299-312 (2007) and “Mobile Monuments: A view of historical reenactment from inside the costume cupboard of history” by Stephen Gapps, also in Rethinking History 13:3, 395-409 (2009). I’m still working my way through “Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment” by Simon During, again from Rethinking History, 11:3, 313-333 (2007). There’s a good bibliography at the University of York, but getting at these takes JSTOR or ProjectMUSE access; check with your local public or university library. For list of books about commemoration, History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration by Kirk Savage is an excellent starting place. To find out more about why reenactments differ on different sites, and to discover more about the sometimes-fraught relationship between the NPS and reenactors, you can read this on the role of reenactors at National Parks.

The article that resonated most was Gapps. He wrote about a variety of reenactment types, but what made sense to me as a member of two military reenactment groups, both part of the Brigade of the American Revolution, was his writing about the military reenactments. Gapps focuses on Civil War reenacting, and that is an area in which I’m not interested, but his central tenet rang true to me:

…the performance of history has been largely dismissed by cultural critics as a form of nostalgia, but … it actually has a significant role to offer – particularly as a form of public commemoration of shared remembrance of historical events.

Mr S between the Adjutant and the Dollmaker. Thanks to JacobMar1ey on flickr.

Public commemoration is a large part of the reenactments I’m involved with, but they work differently for participants and spectators, and for different kinds of participants. For a recent example, Mr S and I spent Monday morning in Concord at the North Bridge ceremony, and had two very different experiences.

He came back from the bridge and said, “I was really scared. For a moment there, crossing the bridge and seeing all the British forces, I had a sense of what it must have been like.”

On the North Bridge. Thanks to JacobMar1ley at flickr.

While he had been on the bridge, I was in the gardens with the public thinking, Those poor British soldiers, while I listened to the crackle of candy wrappers and people giggling about their dogs. The crowd spread out on the hill that leads to the Concord River, festival-style, and I was appalled that they came for entertainment to what I thought of as a truly ceremonial and commemorative event. The NPS rules about engagements and casualties suddenly made a lot of sense.

My friend wrote specifically about how reenactments can never portray the reality of fear and horror that is war. She is right. NPS agrees: Even the best-researched and most well-intentioned representations of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare. The activity and logistical support for modern battle reenactments is inconsistent with providing a memorial atmosphere. There is something about reenactments that I cannot fully embrace even as I love them. I have a difficult relationship with “patriotism,” as I have a difficult relationship with America, and much as I have a difficult relationship with my family and friends, whom I also love dearly, though rarely demonstratively.

Naked Raygun, Chicago.

I have been grappling with the concept of America and history and the meaning of American symbols—semiotics—since I started making art. I came of age in the punk years in Chicago, stapling photocopied collages to telephone poles. Reagan was president, nuclear war seemed imminent. I made sculpture and installations about American architecture and literature, as a way to explore American history. I remain skeptical about the political process, even as I engage in it.

So why am I a reenactor? It isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, personally—intellectually—it can be difficult to fully embrace sometimes. Recently, with online discussions of gun control and the relationship between rifle/black powder clubs, the NRA, and reenactors, it has been difficult to grapple with all of the different points of view and to be true to one’s beliefs. Most of the time people don’t air their opposing views. Some of us do, as one writer noted, hold our noses and pay our dues. I knew this going in.

But reenacting, in a way, is an art form for me, a very personal one, one that this blog is part of.

Another friend avoids the military reenactments and sticks to living history through museum work. Mr S enjoys the farm work as much as the battles, because he likes working hard. He likes the physical experience of both; he likes the people, too, and whether he’s chopping wood with the hat maker or crossing the bridge with the adjutant, the shared experiences mean a lot to him. For me, the most profound experiences of women’s history have come at the farm, probably because that is the truest means of reaching the past for a woman I have yet to discover. Can I find that moment in military reenacting? Perhaps, by working hard at recreating the army follower experience.

Unlike monuments, reenactments have the potential to create more open ended and contextual historical commemorations. (Gapps, abstract)

One thing I do not like about the battles is the public. I stand on the public side of the rope line, and think, “Those are my people out there, on the field.” The public—the predatory photographers, the hooting guys, the texting teens, the snacking people—seem so out of place to me. I know it’s entertaining, but it’s somewhere between real and not real, and I can’t forget that it is often about something that was real.

Photo by Evan McGlinn for NY Times. Click for slide show.

Photo by Evan McGlinn for NY Times. Click for slide show.

Mr S hears spectators yell, Get those British bastards! but that doesn’t mean he likes to hear it. It’s not just because we have friends among those enemies, but because they represent men who, just like the Americans, were scared and wounded, hungry and dying. They were here doing their jobs in a place claimed by the British Crown. Does that yell miss the point of the reenactment as commemoration? Is it simple boorishness? Does the comment show the relationship between reenactment and spectator to be too close to blood sport?

Or is the problem that some of the military reenactments fail to adequately contextualize the ‘battle’ as a commemoration or demonstration? Does narration help? We discussed this in the car on the way home from Battle Road: amplified narration and role-playing can deepen the experience for visitors and reenactors alike. What are the better ways to present history for the public? (We’re not suggesting narration for Battle Road: we were comparing notes on different events, and the different perspectives we have from two sides of the rope line.)

I think it’s encouraging when reenactors, even some who might be stereotyped from a distance as old guys who’ll never change, ask themselves questions about what they do, and how, and why. Questions are where we start, and conversations. I’m glad my friend started a conversation. We won’t all like or agree with every statement, but we have to keep talking.

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