Victoria Albert (2021.5)
For my first few months of college, I tried to avoid telling people I was a Feb, because they would inevitably ask, “What did you do over your Feb-mester?” and I would have to say, “I worked at a living history museum.” And then I would explain, “That’s like where you dress up in a costume and cook and do farm chores and show people what life was like in the past.” And then I would be met by confused looks, which I deserved, because who would want to give up running water and food hygiene for the sole purpose of letting other people chuckle at you and say, “Yeah, life was harder back then”?
As insane as it sounds, working or interning in living history can be a really enriching experience, and I would especially recommend it to history majors. Even if you aren’t crazy enough to want to pursue a career in public history, it can provide you with a different perspective, a complement, on academic history. My ideas about how the past should be studied, taught, and understood have been shaped by my experiences in public history.
First, a little more about what living history actually entails. You do have to wear a costume, even if it’s hot. On my first day at the living history village I worked at, I was fitted with dresses, petticoats, and a hat. Some living history interpreters are very meticulous about their attire and actually oppose the term “costume.” They sew all their clothes by hand, using period-appropriate fabric, sewing techniques, needles, and thread. The village where I worked was not like this: interpreters were expected to provide their own shoes, for example, so some volunteers wore sneakers. All of which is to say, there is a balance in living history between accuracy and comfort, and you can usually make your own choices about where you want to stand on that spectrum.
At the village, I split my time between a farm and a tradesman’s home. I did a lot of cooking demonstrations at both: each day, the village administration would give us a cooking project which took us most of the day to complete. Visitors would witness whatever stage of the process we happened to be at when they arrived. If they came early in the morning, they could watch us building a fire, whereas if they arrived late in the afternoon, they might see us washing dishes. While we cooked, we would talk to visitors about the meaning of our work, what it reflected about daily life, mindsets, social relations, or economics at the time, and take questions. When we finished cooking, we demonstrated crafts like straw braiding and knitting, and sometimes we did cleaning. At the farm, I also fed the chickens, cows, and pigs, which was actually a highlight of my job. There was a one-year-old calf and a brood of newly-hatched chicks at the farm when I was there, and I think spending time around them was good for my soul.
Aside from bonding with baby animals, which is an obvious advantage of living history work, you learn to interact with history in a very different way from the research-it-and-write-a-paper-about-it method we use here. You have to read and research on your time period, of course, but you use the information very differently. Living history interpreters build stories and arguments out of seemingly simple objects and actions. For example, straw-braiding can be a portal to talk about the process of industrialization and how it affected women’s work in the home. At the same time, you have to be subtle and deft, and work with the interests of the visitor in front of you. You have to use their questions and comments as a base to weave in facts and anecdotes that grab their interest and gently point them toward the idea you want them to understand. In this way, living history is a dialogue. Visitors bring their memories, beliefs, and personal experiences, and as an interpreter your job is to use those beliefs and experiences, plus your knowledge of history, to help make history mean something to the visitors. Yet living history also offers the opportunity to change the way people think. I have had powerful moments as a living history interpreter explaining how women did have opportunities to express their autonomy “back then,” and watching people think, or smile in surprise, and say, “Wow—I never realized that.”
As a living history interpreter, you develop excellent soft skills. You get to meet and talk with people from all over the world, and so you learn to form connections across difference. On the less-appealing side, you also have to learn not to automatically disengage when people irritate you. You have to respond patiently and politely when a hundred visitors ask the same question in a day or when someone comments, “Women back then wouldn’t be strong enough to lift those kettles.”
Finally, as a living history interpreter you get a sense of the texture of life in the period you portray. Being immersed in the sounds, sights, and smells of the time gives you a tangible, experiential taste of the past you can’t get from a textbook. For me, living history work illuminated the similarities and differences between the human experience in the 19th century and today. Coming into the internship, I felt distanced from the past. Everything seemed alien, from the dusty root cellars to the fly-ridden apple rings hanging from the kitchen ceiling. But as I went on, building fires, getting sooty, cooking, scrubbing, harvesting apples in the sunshine, I also felt a little closer to the past, as if I was peering through a window, just glimpsing the frustrations, worries, and joys people felt then.
Living history internships aren’t for everyone. But if you have an interest in material culture, public history, or museum studies—or even if you don’t—it’s worth a try. You might end up overheated, worked off your feet, and talked hoarse, but you might—like me—end up falling in love, and coming back for more.