The Walter Scott Experience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Historical Reenactment ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Living History Museum ◽  
Historical Fictions

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.

An 18th Century Internet: Modeling Knowledge Organization and Information Retrieval in a Living History Museum

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Jank
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Information Access ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Knowledge Organization ◽  
Living History ◽  
Interactive Learning Environment ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Access Protocols ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Living History Museum

The purpose of this paper is to examine knowledge organization structures and information access protocols in the Colonial Williamsburg historic restoration in Williamsburg, Virginia. It reports the results of a pilot project designed to provide preliminary models for studying such schema in the interactive learning environment of living history museums.Le but de cet article est d’examine les structures d’organisation de la connaissance et les protocoles d’accès à l’information lors des reconstitutions historiques de Colonial Williamsburg à Williamsburg, en Virginie. Sont présentés les résultats d’un projet pilote conçu pour dégager des modèles préliminaires d’étude de schémas dans l’environnement d’apprentissage interactif que constituent les musées d’histoire vivante. 

Defining, Constructing, and Communicating Heritage at a "Living History" Museum: The Case of the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Beck
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Living History ◽  
First Person ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Village ◽  
Living History Museum

The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, an open‐air, living history museum, provides a case study of how heritage is defined and presented. Drawing on David Lowenthal’s conception as heritage as a social construction and Diane Barthel’s idea of “symbolic bankers”, this paper explores how the Village has defined heritage and who has been involved in its definition. This paper will argue that the Village uses heritage to promote the cultural identity of the Ukrainian community while simultaneously strengthening Albertan pride and ‘nationalism’ through recognizing diversity and multiculturalism, but excludes the heritages of First Nations peoples and the other settler nations. The paper then evaluates the effectiveness of the Village’s attempts to portray history and communicate heritage considering the first‐person method of interpretation used and the involvement of the Alberta Government. The paper finds that the limitations of first‐person interpretation and the economic goals of the Alberta Government have led the Village to a position where it risks the trivialization of Ukrainian cultural meanings and the simplification and sanitization of Alberta’s historical narrative.

Maintaining Boundaries, or ‘Mainstreaming’ Black History in a White Museum

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 177-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gable
Keyword(s):  
Black History ◽  
Living History ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

In this chapter, I explore ethnographically how enduring notions of racial ‘identity’ continue to make it unlikely that an ongoing attempt by America's largest outdoor living-history museum – Colonial Williamsburg – to tell stories about race relations in the antebellum era will be pedagogically effective. I focus on pedagogic practice among Colonial Williamsburg's ‘frontline’ because, while the professional historians ostensibly set historiographical policy and monitor historiographical product at Colonial Williamsburg, it is ultimately the dozens of guides who tell Williamburg's story to the visiting public. Moreover, I focus on the way guides talk about a particularly revealing topic – miscegenation – because it is a generally accepted argument among historians of antebellum America that the history of laws against miscegenation (which were codified in the eighteenth century), coupled with the history of their systematic violation, is at the root of the invention of distinct racial categories. To tell this story of ‘kinship denied’ at Colonial Williamsburg would have meant that a largely white audience and a mostly white ‘frontline’ would have had to rethink the category of race itself in ways perhaps more threatening to their ‘identities’ than to their ostensibly ‘black’ peers. In this chapter, I suggest that the way miscegenation remained a resisted topic at Colonial Williamsburg, reinforces, at the level of vernacular historiography, the very dichotomizing thinking about racial categories that the topic should have called into question.

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