You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor

The opening salvo of “The Unfinished Revolution,” The Atlantic‘s year-long project “exploring 250 years of the American experiment,” includes a mighty musket shot from Caity Weaver, whose dispatch from a pair of Revolutionary War reenactments is an exemplar of the genre. Weaver, one of our most delightful participatory journalists, is game, observant, and self-deprecating throughout, snorting snuff with the Green Mountain Boys ahead of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and detailing the elaborate construction and outcome of her outfit before the Battle of Bunker Hill (“a shapeless mound of fabrics crowned by my plain stupid face”). In her hands, fake battles yield resonant ideas about the construction of history—”a free-for-all dash,” she reminds us, “subjected to the whims of regular people.”

Did you know that it is against the rules of America’s national parks to pretend to die in them? If you are reenacting a real battle, that is. Reenactments that imitate exchanges of fire, hand-to-hand combat, “or any other form of simulated warfare” are prohibited in all 433 prelapsarian sites under the stewardship of the National Park Service. “Even the best-researched and most well-intentioned representation of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare,” the park-management guide beseeches. It is hard to argue with this, particularly if one has ever read, for instance, the memoir of Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who was 19 when he wintered in New Jersey under Washington’s command. “We were absolutely, literally starved,” he wrote. “I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them, and I was afterwards informed by one of the officers’ waiters, that some of the officers killed and ate a favorite little dog.”

And yet. If one’s goal is to captivate the public with wonders of the past, so much so that they might care about a former age enough to actually learn something, explosive combat reenactments are probably the most efficient way to accomplish this. Things that are shocking and terrible provoke our curiosity; if nothing ever went wrong, there would be no newspapers. Also: If you’ve spent six months learning how to properly fire a musket that set you back more than $1,000, you don’t want to just walk around holding it.