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 ...

  The early nineteenth century camp-meeting revivals impacted how Americans understood the separation of church and state. This concept was a political innovation, added to the Constitution because of the insistence of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The model for the First Amendment was the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which became the legal definition of religious freedom in the United States. It reads:                 “We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact [Be it enacted by the General Assembly] that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that...

 The early nineteenth century camp meetings drew so many people that it was impossible for one or two preachers to meet the spiritual and practical demands for preaching, exhortation and ministry. While the location might be associated with a particular denomination (the Cane Ridge Meeting House was Presbyterian, for example), preachers and lay-ministers from every denomination in attendance were pressed into service. This cross-denominational cooperation and collaboration is one of the characteristics that made the revivals so contagious, in my opinion. Even women were exhorters. Of course, this was an unheard of practice in the days where men and women sat in different sections of a church and where women were not invited nor expected to preach to or to teach men. Women exhorters were protested but one preacher retorted to the critic this way, as recorded in A.P. Mead's 1860 history of the camp meeting revivals, Manna In The Wilderness: " You think women are proper teachers ...

  One of the social impacts of the early nineteenth century revival camp-meeting movement was to change the way Americans thought about childhood. Prior to 1800, according to Karen Calvert, “Childhood had no positive attributes of its own worthy of expression. A child was merely an adult in the making, and childhood, as a period of physical and spiritual vulnerability was a deficiency   to be overcome.” [1] By 1800, more than half (55.2%) of the people living on the Kentucky frontier were children under the age of 16. This compares to 49% for the rest of the new United States, according to Ted A. Smith. [2] So, many younger people would have been present at the camp meetings. When children began to respond spiritually, this was unprecedented and unusual. Children as young as five were recorded to have addressed adults at these camp meetings, standing on benches, tree branches and from the shoulders of adults. Their religious exhortations were taken seriously both by other ch...

  Over the next several weeks, this blog will feature posts about the early nineteenth century camp meetings such as the Cane Ridge Revival [1] in Bourbon County Kentucky which happened in August 1801. It was organized and promoted over several months as a Presbyterian celebration of Holy Communion. While Holy Communion remains a very important ordinance in every modern Christian denomination and church, it is usually embedded in a regular congregational meeting, taking no more than about 30 minutes. This was not the case with eighteenth and early nineteenth century Presbyterians. Consistent with the traditions brought to the United States by Scottish Presbyterians, Communion took at least three days. First the prospective participants were required to prove that they were spiritually qualified to receive the bread and wine that represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The next day was for the actual sacramental meal. The third day was given to praise and thanks to God for ...