Imagine a life where there is no such thing as running water, flushable toilets, deoderant, television, electric lights and computers. Life tended to be short and pretty nasty where if you didn't manage to get yourself killed in one of the many wars there were to fight, you tended to die of diseases like the flu and measles.
You sleep in a canvas tent with nothing to keep you warm but a wool blanket and you cook your meals on an open fire no matter what the weather. In the summer you roast and the the winter you freeze and you live with the knowledge that all of the soldiers around you could be killed at any momment.
Now imagine that there are people who think this is a nifty way to spend a weekend...
I know... your first response is "Who let all these loonies out on a day pass at once?" And I wouldn't blame you. I have the dubious honor of trying to explain the appeal of being a living historian to the uninitated. There's no easy way to explain why we would subject ourselves to difficult living conditions and physical discomfort on our time off. Shelter from the elements is usually nothing but a tent (if you're lucky), you get eaten by every bug in a fifty mile radius who seem to have mastered the art of grabbing a meal right through your corset and it's sure to rain on the day you decided to wear your new dress to an event.
Yet every weekend, thousands of people across the country pack up their cars and trucks and shlep out to a field in the middle of nowhere to set up camp, play soldier and try to imagine, even for just a little while, that they are really living in a long ago time.
To start, I've been a living historian since 1990. I started out, like most reenactors, with great love of history - primarily Medieval Europe. My father was the family's Civil War junkie and one day he discovered that there were people who dressed in the uniforms and reenacted the battles. After a bit of looking around, he hooked up with a group of men who portray that USS Sharpshooters, or the Berdans Sharpshoots - a unit of snipers and skirmish fighters during the Civil War. He joined up and sort of took the whole family along for the ride.
In the meantime, I had been attending the NY Renassance Faire in Sterling Forest, NY for ages and had toyed around with joining one of the medievalist groups operating in my area. Through some friends, I joined up with a small independant group based in the New York area and quickly found myself attending events and elevating my interest to more serious and diversitfied scholorship.
Now over ten years later, it's all second nature to me to properly look and act the periods that I reenact. I am as comfortable in a corset and hoops as I am in jeans. I have no problem sleeping in a tent, cooking over a campfire for a bunch of surly soldiers and basically "acting like a lady". I don't flinch at the sound of gunfire and I've learned to load and fire a Sharps breachloading blackpowder rifle. (I really love fireing that gun!)
All in all, this past decade has proven to be some of the most educational rewarding experiences of my life and it's my great pleasure to share it with you. Please follow the links below to take you to the various worlds that I get to visit on a regular basis.
The Medieval World
The War Between the States
