News: Are The Iraq/Afghanistan Wars Putting A Lid on Civil War Reenactments?

A Brief History Of Civil War Reenactment, Dan Fastenberg, Time.com, Saturday, July 3, 2010.

On July 4th, America's 300 million citizens will mark the 234th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The holiday weekend that's famous for fireworks, barbecues and apple pie is increasingly being used as an occasion for tens of thousands of Americans that identify as "hard-core" war reenactors to wear outfits made from 19th century fabric adorned with arcane military pins. For the July 4th holiday also marks another major American historical milestone — the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place from July 1st to July 3rd in 1863. For American war reenactors, the battle is the Gettysburg of their annual reenactment calendar.

"When you come to the fields of Gettysburg, you cannot help but feel the awe," said Andrea DiMartino, the media supervisor for Gettysburg Anniversary Committee. DiMartino, who moved to the southern Pennsylvania town fifteen years ago to be closer to the battleground site (and even has the number 1863 in her e-mail address) will help organize the weekend's reenactment festivities that runs from July 2nd to July 5th. Events are scheduled to run around the clock, and will include a reenactors' dance as well as live mortar-fire demonstrations. (In 2006, the U.S. National Park Service banned reenactment on actual battleground sites, saying, "Even the best-researched and most
 well-intentioned representation of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare.")

"Reenactment is a nice relief from today's electronic reality," said Kirk Davis, the president of the American Living History Educational Society, a group that has some 500 members reenacting battles from the French and Indian War up through World War II. "It's always a very safe scripted event. We have a lot of veterans, but all people like to hear the cannons going off."

War reenactment is by no means an American phenomenon. By all accounts, the impulse to dress up and play Hektor is as old as Hektor himself. Both the Greeks and the Romans infused elaborate battle scenes into their dramatic cultures. And many contemporaneous reenactors credit the tragedies of William Shakespeare, his stage designs at the Globe Theatre and his depictions of battles as a major inspiration for modern reenactment. Among the great reenactments: the 1066 Battle of Hastings that gave birth to modern England. The restaging of the Norman Invasion takes place every year in October around the same iconic hill in southeastern England, and on major anniversary years (those ending in one and six) the number of participants can reach as high as 5,000. The dressing up in 11th century war gear — medieval metal helmets and all — takes place under the auspices of a group called English Heritage, which is affiliated with the British government.

"There is something deeply democratic, and republican, in the attempt to make history your own, rather than to leave it to the academics and the schools, television stations and politicians," says Wolfgang Hochbruck, a history professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, who was a one-time American Civil War reenactor. "Not that reenactment is necessarily progressive — a lot is politically backward at best."

In the U.S., which compared to England and Germany is a relatively young country, no conflict has spread the reenactment bug quite like the Civil War. Reenacting the War Between the States took off as early as the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg in 1913, when veterans from both the old Confederacy and the Union returned to that battlefield. The veterans, many in their 70s, were reduced to waving their canes as they reenacted Pickett's Charge, says Tony Horwitz, the author of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. The septuagenarians were joined by then president Woodrow Wilson, who was hoping to use the event to mark the end of animosity stemming from the Civil War.

For some participants, reenactment can be more than just an outlet for relief. "Educators today do not want to show weapons, do not want to show war," said John Houck, a Maryland-based reenactor since 1991. "We're out there teaching to the American people. In school you have two weeks to teach four years of war. My ancestors fought four years as Confederate soldiers and I applaud that. We lost the war and that's fine. But let's tell the real story. We're all Americans."

Many Civil War reenactors are gearing up for a round of 150th anniversary encampments to begin in 2011 at South Carolina's Fort Sumter. As a testament to society's enduring fascination with the Civil War, reenactments of its battles takes place regularly throughout the world, from Northern Ireland to Australia.

But after a surge of popularity in the 1980's and 1990's, when Civil War reenactors became more professional about outfit specificity and military pins, thanks in part to movies like Gettysburg and Ken Burns' documentary, numbers have dropped over the last decade from their prior high in the 50,000 range. "When we have real wars going on, a fake war is less appealing," says Horwitz.

CWL: Time will tell. If the 150th Anniversary reenactments draw fewer reenactors and fewer large audiences, then the tide has turned for Civil War reenacting. On the other hand, you have reenactors not participating in large audience events in order to organize and participate in no audience or small audience events that lend themselves to a 'life as it was' experience.

Text Source: Time.com

Top Image Source: Kindred Blood

Middle Image Source: Zcache

Bottom Image Source: Zazzle

News---An Authentic Reproduction of a Coffee Wagon, A Lady And the 2008 Gettysburg Reenactment

Saturday Diary: Living In the 19th Century, Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Saturday, July 12, 2008

The Confederate cavalry rode into our camp, eyeing the iron contraption with three tall smokestacks mounted on a wagon near my tent. "Are you interested in our coffee wagon?" I asked.

I explained that it was a working replica of those that the U.S. Christian Commission built during the Civil War. It could brew 108 gallons an hour, and was one tiny part of the vast aid supplied by the Christian Commission to both Union and Confederate soldiers. Since I was talking to Rebs and we happened to be in Gettysburg, I pointed out how the Christian Commission was crucial in caring for the 6,800 Confederates among the nearly 21,000 wounded troops left behind in Gettysburg after both armies pulled out.

"Where are you from?" I asked them.

"Alaska," one of the rebels replied. We were on a farm in Gettysburg last week for the 145th anniversary of the battle that saved the Union. Beneath my apron I wore a badge that designated me a "Living Historian." Many re-enactors have a "Civil War gene," and are obsessed from birth with America's bloodbath. I am not one of them. I married into the cult.

I grew up in California, where the Civil War seemed as distant as the War of the Roses does to Pennsylvanians. But I was a fifth-generation Californian due to the Civil War. My Rodgers ancestors were Union sympathizers in East Tennessee who fled to San Francisco in 1863. I knew that my husband, Rea, was a re-enactor before we first dated in 2003. I told him I would never do mud, blood or corsets. But after six months, I knew that I had to try or resign myself to many weekends alone. Re-enacting isn't a hobby, it's a lifestyle.

Gettysburg is full of Civil War dress shops. But my first visit to our nation's hallowed ground was in jeans and work boots. Our unit portrays the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves, and each May we go to the 9th's monument to clear brush. We help keep the park accessible, and honor those who died. Seeking a civilian to portray, I stumbled onto the little-known history of the Christian Commission, an evangelical mission to the Union Army. It's motive was to save souls, but it became an extremely adept relief organization that saved many lives. It appealed to me because I knew church history and understood its context.

I sometimes serve as a guide at the U.S. Christian Commission Museum in Gettysburg, which set up the encampment where I showed off the coffee wagon. I'm now working on my impression of Jane Boswell, a doctor's widow and devout Lutheran from Baltimore who went to many battlefields with her 19-year-old daughter to care for the wounded. Developing a good impression is like researching a master's thesis. I have to learn the (complicated) wartime history of Baltimore and the aftermath of several battles.

I've learned to redo myself as a 19th-century woman. Details are everything. I love counted cross-stitch, a popular art in the 1860s. I knew I'd created an accurate impression when tourists briefly mistook me for a ghost as I browsed a Gettysburg bookstore lodged in a Victorian house. I suspect re-enactors are at the root of many ghost stories. But I explained who I was, and the tourists took their children's picture with me.

I don't have a romantic view of the Civil War. When friends asked if we would have a Civil War wedding, I replied that the war was about separation, fratricide, agony, disfigurement, death and grief. Its sole claim to glory is that slaves were emancipated. But after that, they were cheated of their rights. Those were not themes I wanted at my wedding. (That said, we spent our honeymoon in Gettysburg. It was my idea.)

Re-enacting is not just about battles. I've been doing this since 2004, and this month's Gettysburg re-enactment was the first battle I've attended. Mostly I've done living history, whether for the National Park Service, at historical societies or for the Carnegie Library in Carnegie, where our unit maintains a room in which Union veterans used to meet. Re-enacting is about teaching and preserving history.

We return to the 9th's monument each November on Remembrance Day, the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Thousands of re-enactors, both Union and Confederate, pour into town for a parade unlike any other.

I've got no sympathy for the Confederate cause, and I'll argue if the modern-day rebels claim the South wasn't fighting for slavery. But there is nobility in the butternut re-enactors who return each year to the scene of their side's great defeat. They're not doing it to start a new rebellion or to bring back slavery. They are there to fulfill the hope of grieving mothers long ago that their sons would not be forgotten.

After the parade, I join my husband and the other men, and we march to the foot of Little Round Top. There we lay a wreath and pray at the monument to our unit. We remember the boys who died so long ago. We remember the men and women who sacrificed to care for the wounded. We remember, and we teach, in the hope that this history will not be repeated.

Text Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 12, 2008

United States Christian Commission's museum and education center is located in Virginia Wade's birthplace on Baltimore Avenue in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Disclosure: The Civil War Librarian is the spouse of the Ann Rodgers, Staff Writer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.