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 and think from then until now. When elementary students interact with individuals from the past, they are forced to imagine what life was like then. 

This is what will happen when your students take a field trip to a camp-meeting at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project in Paris, Kentucky. They will journey along a half-mile walking trail to the footbridge that takes them into the re-imagined pop-up camp meeting area. Along the way, they will encounter factual information stated in secular language about the Christian religion and its history (good and bad) in Kentucky. A large sign at the entrance to the camp meeting will identify the various "stations" - tents and camp fires with food cooking, wagons for sleeping and for vendors selling their wares, a raised preaching platform, and an area filled with puncheon benches where singing happens. 

Your class will be divided into five groups. Each group will be hosted by a costumed interpreter who will introduce and facilitate a series of conversations and activities - an enslaved African American preacher and his wife, a woman from England who is traveling through the United States to write a book, a "rowdy" turned circuit riding preacher, and a Native American. The diversity of the interpretive staff reflects the fact that the camp meetings were meeting places for people who would otherwise likely never have peacefully intersected in the early nineteenth century. Their opinions and what they tell about their experiences at camp meetings will be tailored to your class's grade level but they will touch on the socio-political, economic, philosophical and cultural topics that would have been the conversations at the actual camp meetings. Your students will taste food they helped to prepare, engage with old ideas about women, childhood, religion, politics and life on the American frontier in the early 1800's. They will sing some songs that represent the camp meeting tunes and motions that influenced the development of both the Negro spiritual and traditional American folk music. They will help set up a tent, perhaps engage with a tethered horse, and be able to purchase souvenirs from a vendor wagon. Each group will rotate to a different "station" hosted by a different interpreter until each group has experienced each activity.

In short, this field trip to a re-imagined early nineteenth century camp meeting will connect your students with what was a pop-up ephemeral phenomenon that started here in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Then it spread virally across the country to become the Second Great Awakening. This religious movement helped to end slavery, started social activist efforts in support of  abolition, women's suffrage and temperance which impacted the cultural conscience of our nation. 

Without using the interpretive strategy of Living History, the camp meeting phenomena is impossible for students to really explore. Even using a related educational method, Place-based Learning, fails to make this topic accessible to students since the camp meetings were ephemeral gatherings on the edges of woods or in open meadows that have long since vanished from view. Where old meeting houses, such as the Cane Ridge Shrine, remain, they have been preserved as architectural curiosities with adjacent cemeteries in which individuals associated with the historic meetings have been buried. So the idea of thousands of people gathering to meet, sing, consider religious claims, and live together for four to seven days is difficult for students to imagine. 

We decided to use Living History as the main strategy by which we present information about these early nineteenth century Kentucky camp meetings. This decision has led us to involve a team of scholars and practitioners in the associated humanities fields including four who are experts in Living History interpretation, museum theater, and first-person Chautauqua performances (see the Kentucky Humanities Council for information on Chautauquas).  These experts have agreed to critique, refine and help to ensure that our field trips to a camp meeting are excellent educational experiences for public school students at three grade levels: fourth grade, middle school and high school. 

Field trips to a camp meeting will be available beginning in September 2022, assuming that schools are back to normal and are permitting students to take field trips. In August 2022, a teacher open-house will be offered. All of these programs are free but pre-registration will be required for both student field trips and for participation at a teacher open-house. Watch this blog, follow the Kentucky Faith & Public History page on Facebook, or our website for details, dates, and registration information.

By Lesley Barker, PhD

Lesley Barker is the former executive director of the Bolduc House Museum in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, (now the Centre for French Colonial America). She transitioned that site from an object-driven, lecture-based interpretive strategy to Living History. Her doctorate, from the University of Leicester (in England) is in Museum Studies with a focus on museum interpretation and the interpretation of race in America.