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Brooksville Raid is fun, but it isn't a lesson in historyThis article echoes what Scout has mentioned on here in the past - that some historical re-enactments say more about people living in modern times than it does about people living in previous ages. Still, I get the feeling that Civil War re-enactors are more historically accurate than those of the SCA or other groups who attempt to portray dress or culture from the Middle Ages. Despite the author's mention that the event lacked historical accuracy, I did find this interesting:
I did find a lot of people who cared about the past and a few who knew enough names and dates to make me feel that my years as a college history major had been a pitiful waste.
So even if re-enactments can't teach the general public history, it does seem to teach a great deal of history to the actors themselves.
Re-enactments are fun and keep history alive so to speak, but they aren't always accurate. I do believe the participants try to get it right, but to perfectly duplicate some of the mock battles is too expensive and large in scope to accomplish.
Yeah, and according to that article, duplicating real battles can sometimes prove to be too much of a let-down. It seems that they didn't want to re-enact an event in which the Confederacy lost, so they had to make one up.
It is extremely difficult to re-enact historical battles 100% accurately. I think you are both right in that the re-enactors try to get it right and teach themselves lots of history in their effort to do so. Even if the history they are learning is extremely narrowly focused. They have re-enactor groups here in Europe too that re-enact medieval as well as medieval battles.I unwittingly embarassed one Napoleonic re-enactor several years ago when I pointed out that Prussian troops wore a kind of Shako during the Napoleonic Wars and not the pickelhaub he was wearing. Several of his colleagues started razzing him about how they had told him he was wrong and even a visitor knew it when he said no-one would notice.Another group of amateur istorians that go to extremes in learning history are miniature gamers. In fact several gaming societies have prominent and not-so prominent historians present papers at their annual conventions. They are considered scholalry presentations in the field of military histroy because the academic rigour is expected to be there like in any other conference.
