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Showing posts from March, 2022

Living History is the primary strategy your students will experience when your class takes a field trip to a camp meeting

     Living History is a term for an interpretive strategy used at museums like Colonial Williamsburg  or Conner Prairie . It is when visitors are ushered back to a specific place in the past that is peopled by costumed interpreters doing everyday tasks using authentic tools and materials or else very accurate reproduction artifacts. Often the visitors are encouraged to assist with the activities. Sometimes the interpreters have adopted a persona based on a real person. This approach uses theater methods and requires each character to have a very detailed understanding of the time and circumstances their person would have lived in. It takes research to locate the documents, oral history resources, and evidence from material culture from which each character is created. Then it takes a certain discipline to maintain the character's first-person perspective when visitors interact from their modern point of view. This introduces a fun tension that emphasizes the shifts in how we live