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

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.

The Walter Scott Experience

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.

Playing Victorian

The British heritage industry has long been a subject for debate in the UK, with critics arguing that heritage invests history with a nostalgic idealism that sanitizes and simplifies the nation’s past. This article examines Blists Hill Victorian Town, a British living history museum that purports to re-create everyday industrial life of the 1890s, within the context of these debates, arguing that Blists Hill portrays the late-Victorian period with more complexity than many critics would allow. Shifting the lens of how such sites have typically been evaluated—away from questions of authenticity, to instead focus on how living history museums engage visitors in meaningful play—I consider the ways that Blists Hill promotes creative learning through an imaginative, visceral engagement with history.