Watching or participating in a living history reenactment can be exciting as well as educational.
Reenactment is a hobby that is built in part on a passion for knowledge about the past and also from a love of presenting those stories in the most accurate ways.
More than just acting from a script, living history reenactments and especially living history battle reenactments, provide a real-time look at what these moments in time were like by not just giving a performance but actually living this history.
How Are Living History Reenactments Done?
There is much more to an accurate living history reenactment than reciting a script and in fact, there are no scripts involved at all.
Instead, impressions as they are called are all research-based, from the politics of the day to the last button on the clothing of the time.
Reenactors study the specific time periods in which they are interested and then, within their reenactment groups, put on events where everyone can take on an assigned role to tell a chosen story from that time period.
Some have called it time traveling through roleplaying and although people of all kinds are able to participate in these events, historically accurate groups follow the rules of the day, which can dictate what roles a man or a woman might play in an accurate, historical living history reenactment.
Reenactors vs Living Historians
Among the groups of reenactors throughout the country, there are those who take their hobby so seriously that they begin to adopt some of the attributes of those that they are impersonating.
Alternately, there are those that do not take it quite as seriously and are more interested in the action of battle reenactments and portraying the life and times of those from specific periods in American history.
Among those, the hobby also distinguishes the difference between reenactors who play active roles in these events and the living historians who are responsible for much of the research and frequently have speaking roles to narrate to the audience.
In Summary
In either case, living history reenactment is a hobby that draws not from fantasy but from actual historical events, making learning about history more fun and more detailed now than it ever was learning about it in school.
Whether presented in the form of a mock living history battle reenactment or a third-person storytelling where reenactors speak to their audiences to explain what is happening, these performances provide an impressive glimpse into the past provided by dedicated historians who are teaching, while having fun doing it!