Tag Archives: The Public

15 Ways to Have a Bad Living History Event

13 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Events, Snark

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The Enraged Musician. Chaos has a long history, and often I am for it.

The Enraged Musician. Chaos has a long history, and often I am for it. But not always.

For Organizers

  1. Do not advertise. Having no audience makes an event super-lame.
  2. Have no attendance limits on a closed site. Intense crowds and no security makes an event scary. Add alcohol for intensity.
  3. Do not publish participant standards or a schedule. Confusion and laxity breed chaos.
  4. Publish standards, but do not enforce them uniformly. Creating the appearance that standards are only enforced for people you don’t know erodes trust and credibility and discourages participation, reinforcing adolescent clique behavior.
  5. Do not highlight (or provide) participant amenities like water, toilets, or dry firewood.
John Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname. Good times, no?

John Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname. Authentically bad behaviour.

For Participants

  1. Don’t bring your own lunch, water, or powder.
  2. Don’t follow the rules at a new event. Standards are for chumps. Text your friends while minding a rope line and acting as an interpreter.
  3. Get drunk. Who doesn’t love an inebriate around gunpowder? Safety, schmafety. Besides, drunkenness is authentic.
  4. Smoke cigarettes on the field. You can always hide your hand behind your back, next to your cartridge box…what can go wrong? The captain will never notice.
  5. Make critical comments about the public and other reenactors just within their hearing. Don’t smile.

For the Public

The Death of General Wolfe, Benjamin West. NGC

What, no dogs? The Death of General Wolfe, Benjamin West. NGC

  1. Bring a dog. Dogs love guns, drums, and cannons. “Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war,” right?
  2. Ride your bicycle through the crowd. Make disparaging comments about the crowd interrupting your ride.
  3. Touch things and people. Touch reenactors’ tools, weapons, clothes, children, food. Heck, use their tools. It’s not real, it’s history, so it has to be safe–right?
  4. Interrupt people answering your questions, or better yet, someone else’s questions, and answer yourself.
  5. Get drunk, especially on a hot, humid summer day or night.

Stop.

Breathe.

Think.

Then speak or act. Think about what you’re doing. Is it sensible? Is it kind? Is it how you would like to be treated? Does you behaviour foster a pleasant and welcoming environment?

If not, don’t do it.

Rumours of Bore

03 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Events, Living History, Reenacting

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Detail, The Letter. Pietro Longhi, 1746. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.32.1

Detail, The Letter. Pietro Longhi, 1746. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.32.1

My time-travel was cut short this weekend after a trip to eight-nine-teen-something in Salem, as I had a trip to the Central Fly Over* for work instead. Still, through the magic of telephony and the interwebs, I heard about the Sunday OSV Experience and the Great Drawn Sabre of Saturday. (Caution: Strong language) One presumes and hopes that aside from whatever disciplinary action OSV will take– and they will–the CL commanders will address this clear safety violation.

The news photos show the usual collection of baggy menswear (are those painters’ pants? is this 1812?) and the Bodice of Myth and Legend (St. Pauli, anyone?) along with obligatory musket firing and “gotcha” shots of fallen soldiers sneaking peeks at the action. I don’t even have to say what we all think when we see those images.

But the Sunday report that struck me the most was this: The tactical went on for 45 minutes, very few soldiers fell, and the public began to leave before it was over. Got that? They got bored. As the teller of this tale said, The magic is gone. You can consider that a public endorsement of either more civilian events or a re-imagined tactical. I prefer the former, you may prefer the latter. But either way, if you’re going to use The Public as your justification for playing armed dress up on a hot day, you’d better engage that public. What that could mean will have to wait for another time, but when people head for the exits, the show won’t last.

* More on that later

The View from Ft Lee

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Events, Living History, Reenacting

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To the South.

Silver and shimmering, there’s Manhattan Island: you can hear the train whistles from the New Jersey shore, this century always intruding on the past. To be honest, this event makes me as nuts as it makes me happy (the 32 pound gun did, finally, go off after four tries). There’s something slap-dash about it, this last event of the season (or the first of next, as the BAR commander would have it). The range and quality of impressions is astonishing but it’s a small, manageable event that’s good for trying things out, and for first-time-users.

Which could bring me to the highlight of the day for someone close to me, but suffice it to say that what happens in the blockhouse stays in the blockhouse and I haven’t seen a particular teenage boy that excited, like, ever. He stayed excited, too, until he finally fell asleep somewhere on I-95 northbound.

Mourn Arms at the end of the Day.

I like the predictable ritual of Fort Lee: it’s always cold, the sun fades around noon and the light is always pale by the afternoon, the guns are always fired, and the blockhouse is always lost. There’s a ceremony up in the town and the square always smells delicious, the kettles are always full of mysterious stew with some charcoal bits mixed in and the kid always has three bowls full.

There are always a lot of photographers stalking the ‘wily and elusive reenactor’ at this event; there’s a Fort Lee photo club and they come every year. Unlike Tower Park, there’s no touching, just long-lens stalking. It’s a little weird and I try not to laugh but the lengths they go to do are funny, somehow, though it’s just someone else’s hobby and obsession.

The comments in the public are always revealing. This year’s prize goes the gentleman who told his son muskets are slow to fire and hard to use because they’re breech loading. I think few people have much experience with the physical world, and we would be well-rewarded for spending some time thinking about larger themes in our interpretations, as I’m not convinced people come with much context for what they’re told or what they see.

The Four in Brown, portraying Colonel Moses Little’s 12th Continental Regiment.

Mr S could not remember the name of the regiment they were portraying when I asked him to remind me: the best he could do was “Colonel Sanders’ Regiment,” which was thankfully taken in good spirits when confessed, but you have to know that a man who has managed to get potato on his hat is, well, let’s call it befuddled with hunger. We were probably all a little punchy with cold when the conversation turned to the overheard remark that there would be parakeet [parapet] firing. I asked how many parakeets it took for a four pound gun: four. And then we were off on a flight of fancy noting that loading the guns with the birds would clean the barrels on the way down, and that a parrot, beak forward and in flight, had a fine and aerodynamic profile, but it is damned hard to load the birds tail-first. [Insert squawking noises and some broadcloth-sleeved arm flapping.] After this, we had a demonstration of a simple rapid-fire musket exchange principle which I believe may have been employed to some good effect in the blockhouse.

On the way down, we had spotted a woman driving with a small parrot on her shoulder, loose in her small car, with a cage in the back, so the day really began on a parrot and parakeet theme, though the Free Men of the Sea were parading in Plymouth. All in all, a very typical, slightly surreal Fort Lee.

Authenticity, Reenacting, and the Mobile Museum

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in Living History, Museums, Reenacting

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No stanchion here: the public marches with the exhibits

The more I think about issues of authenticity in re-enacting, the more I think about museums. Reenactments can be seen, as scholars have suggested, as “mobile monuments,” part of a culture of memorialization and commemoration of the past. “Recreated” battles, or battles staged on historic sites are not just the tactical weapons demonstrations they’re billed as, but rather ritual performances that commemorate notable events and connect practitioners with the past. They’re almost priests of the past, those men in uniform: they wear special robes, carry special equipment, and engage in practices arcane and exclusive–and denied to most women. (Indeed, the practice of women fielding reminds me of the history of women as deacons and eventually priests and bishops in the Episcopal church, but more about women in this hobby another time.)

Dragoon battles are highly staged, for safety

That’s just the battles, though they are also museum theatre, vivid, smoky demonstrations of the ways of the past: what about the rest of the event?

Reenactments, with their ranks of tents, kitchens, and varied participants, are in many ways mobile museums that set up at sites and provide “this weekend only!” semi-immersive experiences for visitors. There’s often a gift shop: the sutlers are there, and the site itself may have a shop, and push re-enactment themed items.

Each vignette or camp is like a gallery or object within a museum. Not all appeal to every visitor, some like Rangers, some like Redcoats, some like Rebels.

Continental camp at Monmouth

But in a world where museums and libraries are among the most trusted sources of information (online and otherwise), there are repercussions for the “mobile museums” of reenactments. If we accept a museum-like role, and see ourselves as custodians and practitioners of the past, we will need to also accept high(er) standards for material culture and presentation. That does not mean first-person interpretation by everyone at all events and it does not mean carrying actual 18th century goods into the field. That’s not good cultural stewardship.

It does mean doing the same hard work that museums do, researching and presenting oneself and one’s chattel with as much thought and care as possible. Who are you? Why do you have what you have? Where did you get it? Why does it look like that?

It means making one’s clothes and kit and accouterments as near to original as possible. The things we carry into the field, onto the stage of the mobile museum, should not look old. They should look used, but they will lack the patina of 235-year-old objects. They’ll represent the prelapsarian past of the objects, a time before they were painted with latex paint.

Can we, all of us, reach the highest levels of presentation? No. There are as many kinds of reenacting units as there are museums. Some are the Met, and have their owned branded truck. Some are your local historic site. Resources vary.

But just as most museums look to national accrediting organizations like the American Alliance of Museums for information on ethics, standards, and professional development, so too can the reenacting groups look to the umbrella organizations like the Brigade of the American Revolution, the British Brigade, and the Continental Line (the Big Three of 18th century reenacting). The BAR has an inspector, and unit inspection and re-inspection has a function similar to AAM accreditation.

At Battle Road 2013

It’s not easy to become an accredited museum, but each museum that goes through the process learns, improves, and becomes stronger for having gone through the process of self-examination and, often, improvement. They meet standards. And like AAM, umbrella organizations can and do have standards, and the individual units have standards. Those are often online, and as individuals and other units strive to improve their impressions, following others’ well-researched and documented standards helps improve the entire field.

Peer-to-peer learning, public distribution of information, detailed and published standards of appearance, presentation and behavior: these exist, but not systematically, in the reenacting community. The more the Big Three can do to function the way the AAM does, the more I suspect we will see authenticity increase in the field.

Because it does matter: if museums and reenactors are trusted sources of information, we owe it to the public and our pride to create the best representation of the past that we can.

…For the Approaching Summer

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Clothing, Research

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Summer is, of course, fully upon us and those of us on the eastern seaboard feel its oppressive and sticky heat. Ordinarily, my town isn’t terribly hot and cools off at night, but like everywhere else, this is not the case. Last weekend, I wore wool; technically a wool and cotton blend, but more problematically, burgundy in color. This is the price of gowns inspired by London watercolors.

Summer

This leads to constant questions: Aren’t you hot in those clothes? Aren’t you dying of the heat?

There is an underlying tone that suggests that perhaps the people of the 18th century didn’t know enough not to wear wool, or perhaps they only had winter clothes. I’ve heard “well, they didn’t know any better,” as if they never took their clothes off, and if only they had, 18th century men and women would have promptly abandoned their stays, gowns, waistcoats and breeches for tank tops, shorts, and wife beaters. Of course, history is not a Fiat commercial.

Well, what did “they” do?

Barbara Johnson's book, 1764.

Barbara Johnson’s book, 1764.

They took their trade to James Green and merchants like him who offered “Piece Goods of every kind … suitable for all Seasons, but more particularly for the approaching Summer.” (Boston Post Boy, August 8, 1763.)

And what would be suitable? Cottons, fine linens, light silks, in light colors.

Barbara Johnson chose floral prints on white backgrounds in July and August of 1764, both could be “suitable for summer.”

And as you probably know, the answer to “Aren’t you hot?” depends on who you are, but is often, “Not really. Once my shift/shirt is soaked with sweat, I’m pretty comfortable.” This is true as long as your shift/shirt is made of linen; cotton and cotton/linen blends don’t wick as well as linen.