Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Living Museums

Abstract

LIVING HISTORY IS AN IDEA WELL KNOWN TO LAY HISTORIANS AND MUSEUM interpreters but seldom heard of in academia. It has taken form as a serious movement in Europe and North America, especially since World War II. Its supporters are numerous and mixed: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Thor Heyerdah, James Deetz, and Alvin Toffler. Museums that use living history as a primary mode of interpretation number in the many hundreds, and their annual visitors number in the tens of millions. Living history has been used by archaeologists to measure the energy needed to pull a wooden moldboard plow on a 1770s Pennsylvania farm. It has helped folklorists rediscover how Pilgrims built their houses and brewed their beer in 1627 Plimoth, and it has provided historians with a method of communicating to contemporary Americans the network of social classes operating in an Indiana frontier village during the 1830s. Finally, living history has become a popular hobby for thousands of history buffs, many of whom made the long march to Yorktown in 1981 to commemorate the end of the American Revolution. By and large, living history has found greater expression in museums, research projects, and folk festivals than in scholarly articles. Thus, this essay must be more of an introduction to the movement's people, places, and ideas than a comprehensive bibliography.I The first part will briefly sketch the history of the movement and will be followed by three sections on the primary functions of living history research, interpretation, and