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The Role of Imagination in Popular History

The study of collective memory has recently attracted a great deal of interdisciplinary
attention, which reflects an understanding that stories have power. History is an especially
important form of story-telling because it can remind members of a group or society of who
we are. Collective memory is history where the producers and audience of a narrative
recognize and identify with the story as being about some group some us of which they are
a part. In the form of collective memory, history both justifies and motivates action.
Central to inquiries into collective memory is the notion that these narratives and histories
generally are socially constructed rather than neutral renditions of an objectively available past.
This construction includes both remembering some stories and forgetting or silencing others.
1
Moreover, all stories about the past are in some way political in that they serve the needs of the
present or, at the very least, illustrate the central social and cultural dilemmas of the present.
Yet most studies of collective memory focus on official or elite accounts of history
despite the fact that popular interest in history abounds. A recent national survey that explored
the importance of history in the lives of Americans found that virtually everyone expressed some
interest in the past. Almost sixty percent of respondents took active steps toward engaging with
history such as visiting history museums and twenty percent of respondents participated "in a
group devoted to studying, preserving, or presenting the past.
2
This paper is based on a project
that investigates one form of the popular history created by this huge and active public
1
Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America
and Japan, in Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1997).
2
Rosenzweig and Thelen, 19.
2
engagement with the past American Civil War reenacting.
3
In particular, by looking at a
significant form of reenacting called magic moments, I argue that reenactments demonstrate a
combination of discourse about the historical record as well as imaginative, affective investment
in historical narratives that characterize the nature of collective memory.
Indeed, despite its predominance in the literature, discussion is only part of what
collective memory can mean for participants. In fact, most of the negotiations and disagreements
about the history of the Civil War period take place away from actual reenactments.
Reenactments are, however, clearly a form of commemoration. The general lack of debate that
takes place at events suggests that there is another important but unexplored aspect of the
experience of collective memory. This experience can best be described as an affective
connection produced through embodied experience and historical imagination. Reenactors often
describe the most intense of such experiences as magic moments in which they feel as though
they really are living in the 1860s. These experiences may not happen at every event, but they
are central to what it means to reenact.
Reenactor narratives of magic moments are significant for two reasons. First, they
contrast with the more dialogue-centered forms of thinking about the production of collective
memory. Magic moments represent the ultimate claim of authenticity because they possess the
aura of certainty absent from other, more purely intellectual interactions with the past. Second,
stories of magic moments provide the only source of access to highly personal and unshared
experiences. The stories told by reenactors about their experiences with the past while
reenacting show us that collective memory can be narrated rather than discussed and personal
rather than shared. Moreover, when seen as the product of intentional, imaginative work, these
3
Briefly, the research for this project consisted of three basic parts: a multi-year ethnography of reenacting, a series
of in-depth interviews, and analysis of on-line conversation among reenactors.
3
stories demonstrate that the role of affect and identification in popular history is more complex
than has previous been thought.
Sentiment and Identification in Culture
Critiques of popular history often focus on attributions of superficiality, which is thought
to impair the ability of citizens to respond appropriately to both history and the present. Yet it is
not only through a relationship with the term authenticity that these concerns are linked to
popular history. Indeed, as a form of popular culture, critiques of popular history also rehearse
many of the same concerns that have been applied to other popular cultural products. Perhaps
the best known of these concerns was raised by scholars of the Frankfurt school with regard to
mass culture. Mass culture was thought to make people passive and to impair their ability to
think critically and act politically. Despite many astute observations about the production of
cultural products, Horkheimer and Adorno, for example, wrote that:
sound filmleaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience,
who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise
detail without losing the thread of the story[S]ustained thought is out of the question if
the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
4

While the influence of reader response theories has made these types of arguments largely
unaccepted with regard to most popular culture, they still thrive in relation to popular history.
Unlike other forms of popular culture, history is still regarded as an arena where consumers of
cultural products cannot be trusted to respond appropriately, and this concern is only exacerbated
by the blurring of fact and affect in historical narratives. Yet many forms of popular history,
such as reenactments, the proposed Disney history park, and docudramas mix historical research
with some amount of fictionalized information for the purposes of filling in the details of the
story and the characters, thus engaging the audience. The concern lies in the possibility that
4
history might need to be distorted in order to sustain audience engagement. While the assumed
consequences of affective engagement drive many of the critiques of popular histories, a closer
look at the complexities of engagement with historical narratives will demonstrate the need for a
more complex way of understanding response to popular history.
5
The two main criticisms of popular history are both based on the premise that popular
culture closes down the potential for social and sometimes political action where it should,
instead, work to open up such spaces. The first major argument concerns the potential
transformation of social issues into individual issues. For critics advancing this viewpoint,
particularizing stories of social problems reduces the likelihood that the problem will be
recognized as a larger social issue. The logic behind this argument suggests that events will
now be seen as not so much resulting from the complex interplay of multiple forces as centering
on the struggle of notable individuals.
6
Pierre Sorlin thus suggests that when we focus on
individuals rather than larger social forces, we lose the sense of causality that is essential to any
perspective of history.
7
In reenacting there is indeed a focus on individuals, frequently to the
exclusion of social issues. However, these two levels of analysis are not necessarily separated in
such a way where they cannot be understood in concert. Instead, individual narratives can
provide a link to social issues through fostering engagement.
Yet it is this very possibility that the individualized narrative increases the likelihood that
audience members might identify with the characters that forms the basis for the second major
4
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), 126-127.
5
Crang makes a similar critique by focusing on the pleasures of reenacting and the need to appreciate different
forms of enjoyment than those normally engaged in by scholars. Crang, 417.
6
Richard Kilborn, Drama Over Lockerbie A New Look at Television Drama-Documentaries, Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television 14 (1994) : 65.
7
Pierre Sorline, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Totowas, NY: Barnes and Noble Imprints, 1980). Shanto
Iyengar makes a similar argument with regard to news coverage. He argues that the tendency to focus news stories
on individual case studies rather than more thematic coverage emphasizing context, leads to pattern where
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criticism of popular history. In this view, identification stems from the realistic nature of popular
history, and by suturing the audience into the perspective of the characters in the narrative
leaves no room for critical distance. Murray Smith summarizes the argument as follows, Rather
than developing and intensifying our understanding of the world, emotional responses to fiction
only serve to siphon off energies which might otherwise have transformed the world. In short,
empathic emotions are an instrument of subjection.
8
Instead, critics argue in the vein of Bertolt
Brecht that things should be made strange in such a way as to break the psychological bond of
identification between spectator and subject. Audiences would thus be encouraged to view what
was being enacted with more critical eyes.
9
If we are not able to attain this critical perspective,
then any potential for political action is foreclosed. Regardless of the social causes of a problem,
the identificatory frame that binds us, as spectators, to a crime in terms of moral outrage rather
than social change.
10

Recent work, however, has attempted to analyze the question of identification from a
perspective that benefits from shifts in the evaluation of popular cultural audiences. Smith
argues that much contemporary theory falls victim to the claims of identification with cultural
objects as universally problematic, which are based upon a simplistic understanding of
identification. First of all, such arguments misapprehend the complexity of response to realistic
representations. Audiences are thought to respond to representations as though either they are
real or unreal. Those against the idea of identification follow the Frankfurt School in arguing
individuals are blamed for social problems rather than society as a whole. Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible?
How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
8
Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 55.
9
Richard Kilborn and John Izod, An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality (New York:
Manchester University Press, 1997), 51.
10
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 39.
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that audiences are seduced into thinking of representations as real.
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Smith, on the other hand,
argues that audiences rarely if ever buy into the reality of fictional representations. In both of
these accounts, perception of reality is understood to be a dichotomous state where audiences can
hold only one view at a time. Yet a small group of scholars theorize that audiences can hold both
of these perspectives simultaneously.
12
Indeed, Freedberg suggests that it is recognition of the
tension between the representation felt as real but recognized as unreal that is the source of
pleasure in such cultural objects. He writes that we recognize the
dialectic of acknowledgment and denial in the process of perceiving the realistic image:
we cannot escape from reconstitution [of the original object], but we tell ourselves that
the image is only artifice....The tension between acknowledging the orchid and realizing
that it is grown in the hothouse of technology, on the one hand, and the preceding
suppression of all thought of technology, on the other, is precisely what constitutes the
aura of verisimilitude.
13

Nevertheless, discussions of identification based on textual realism typically suggest that the
viewer is sutured into the viewpoint and the reality of the text. In the context of the
docudrama, Paget suggests that if the illusion of reality is broken, for example by including too
much documentary in the drama, then identification will be that much harder to reattain.
14
Not
only is engagement dependent on an unbroken illusion of reality, but this formulation also
suggests that audiences can do little to control whether or not they identify with a narrative. Yet
if we look at identification as something that the viewer gives, rather than is duped into, we can
better understand how viewers might be able to both sustain identification and acknowledge their
own willingness to suspend disbelief.
If we acknowledge that identification is a process that requires active involvement, the
11
Horkheimer and Adorno wrote that the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. Horkheimer and
Adorno, 126.
12
Performance theoriest Richard Schechner is one of the more influential scholars forwarding the idea that
spectators believe and disbelieve at the same time. Schechner, 113.
13
Freedberg, 235.
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question becomes what it is that audiences do to produce their engagement with a narrative.
Smith argues that engagement is the product of imaginative work, which can take place in two
primary modes: central and acentral. These distinctions between different modes of imagination
lend greater specificity to an otherwise vague concept. Since Smith works with the medium of
film, not all of his insights are applicable to a situation like reenacting where the line between
producers and consumers of representations are blurred. Yet, imagination is a crucial component
of reenacting experiences.
Central imagination is a process of picturing oneself at the center of the narrative. Smith
identifies three different types of central imagination. The first type, and actually the most
unusual, is comprised of what is most commonly thought of as identification and involves
actually mistaking oneself for a character in a narrative. The second form of central imagination
is picturing oneself as the figure in the narrative without actually coming to believe that one is
experiencing the narrative. The final form of central imagination that Smith associates with
identification involves imagining oneself in the position of the character in a narrative. With
regard to reenacting, the three different forms of central imagination would correspond to
believing yourself to actually be in the Civil War, imagining being in the Civil War from the
perspective of one of the participants, and imagining being in the Civil War from the ones own
perspective rooted in the 21
st
century.
Acentral imagination, which Smith argues is actually the more common way to engage
with fictional narratives, differs from central imagination in that the reader or audience does not
imagine himself or herself in relationship to the narrative. Instead, they imagine the situation of
the characters. Smith describes acentral imagination as follows:
14
Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on Television (New York: Manchester University
Press, 1998), 72.
8
In sympathizing with the protagonist I do not simulate or mimic her occurrent mental
state. Rather, I understand the protagonist and her context, make a more-or-less
sympathetic or antipathetic judgement of the character, and respond emotionally in a
manner appropriate to both the evaluation and the context of the action.
15

Both central and acentral imagining can prompt affective responses to narratives and the
characters within those narratives. However, acentral imagination involves imagining the
narrative rather than imagining being in the narrative.
16
As we will see, the aspect of acentral
imagination most pivotal in the context of popular history is this need to understand the
character and his or her context more completely in order to generate identification which is
marked by emotional response. Despite the differences between these different modes of
imagining, participants can engage simultaneously in central and acentral imagination. In the
case of reenactors, we will see that the desire to better understand and thus acentrally imagine
and affectively engage with a historical narrative is often combined with central imagination
employed to help create that understanding.
Finally, the association between identification and imagination suggests that engaging
with a narrative can both further and deepen understanding by providing a quasi-experience.
As cultural actors, humans learn many facts which they themselves have not directly witnessed
or experienced. Education, journalism, social interaction and many other channels bring this
information to us. Similarly, quasi-experiences allow us to know something about a situation in
which we have not directly participated. Such an experience is one that fosters new
perspectives on the socialthat facilitates imaginative mobility within social space.
17
Even
15
Smith, 86.
16
Handler and Saxton suggest a similar typology for reenacting experiences when they write one speaks of
replicating the experiences of others in order to understand those others, [a form of acentral imagination that allows
the reenactor to more completely fill in the historical narrative] while the other focuses on the authentic experiences
that one achieves or has for oneself [a version of central imagination where the reenactor is the primary figure in
the narrative.] Richard Handler and William Saxton, Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for
Authenticity in Living History, Cultural Anthropology 3 (Fall, 1988) : 242-260.
17
Smith, 94.
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without quasi-experience, however, Corner suggests that identification allows for a more
complete engagement with a social issue. While a text that encourages critical distance can
engage the intellect,
the viewer [confronted] with imaged particularity can engage not just their perception but
their personal and social identity as witnesses....seeing can have a resonance which
elicits from its viewers certain kinds of investment of self
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When we take identification seriously, the fullness of engagement through imagination poses a
challenge to understanding only through intellectual engagement. Perhaps only by working to
experience the past in some way can you not only understand what happened, but also become
decentered in such a way as to experience a new perspective on the present. Yet within
reenacting, these two ways of knowing history are interrelated. Research informs imaginative
experience and experience can inform interpretations of the historical record. While both more
engaged and more detached forms of historical inquiry are interested in relating history with the
present, they result in different types of knowledge that, for reenactors, frequently complement
each other. Yet imagination is especially important in reenacting because it provides a
compelling source of affect-based authenticity that can both deepen and legitimate historical
narratives.
Historical Imagination
Almost all reenactors will say that learning about the Civil War period is one of their
main motivations for participating in reenacting.
19
While many reenactors spend a great deal of
time researching, many feel that their most prized knowledge about the period comes from
18
John Corner, Television Form and Public Address (New York: Edward Arnold, 1995), 31.
19
The other motivations typically claimed are teaching the public about the Civil War, honoring the past, and simply
socializing with friends made through the reenacting community. Most people participate for all these reasons, and
will draw on different motivations to explain different reenacting choices. Thus, some will criticize inauthentic
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having a personal experience of the past. Imagination plays an important role in these
experiences. There are several ways in which one can have such an experience. For some, it is
simply a kind of epiphany that enables them to see a piece of history differently. These kinds of
experiences are the most purely imaginative and involve both central and acentral imagining. In
other words, they require a reenactor to both imagine a narrative of the past and to connect his or
her experiences both real and imagined with that narrative.
After a particularly exhausting day at a reenactment of Chickamauga, Anne told me that
she had never been able to understand why women went willingly to the frontier and once there,
why they stayed. She then explained how reenacting had recently helped her answer that
question, which had always puzzled her. There are very few places for women to become active
within reenacting, so many women spend most of their time at events visiting, shopping for
reenacting equipment and sometimes cooking. Anne portrays a nurse with a medical unit that
spends much of its time making sure that reenactors dont suffer dehydration or heat stroke,
which means that much of her day is taken up with physical work. This contrast struck her as
relevant to the Civil War era, a time when women were politically, militarily and economically
of only peripheral importance. Her own sense of accomplishment at events served to highlight
for her how important it must have felt to feel really useful for the first time.
Annes story exemplifies the significance of imagination in the creation of historical
narratives. Before her reenacting experiences, she had been unable to sympathize with women
of the frontier because she had been unable to imagine their motivations. In an attempt to better
understand what a woman in the past might have felt, Anne projected her own affective state into
the historical narrative. Doing so allowed Anne to both acentrally imagine and react to the
clothing as standing in the way of their own learning process while others will criticize the same thing for
contributing to a lack of understanding about the period among the public that comes as spectators to reenactments.
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narrative of the past and centrally imagine the affective experience of the women involved.
Using her own experiences, Anne was able to fill in the context of the narrative so she might
more fully understand and engage with their story. Annes use here of central imagining acts in
service of the ability to acentrally imagine the stories of historical actors rather than as a
replacement for history.
The significance of relating personal and imagined experience can be seen in the frequent
calls among reenactors to engage in imaginative work to understand the past. Imagination can
also be used in the evaluation of existing narratives, although this use is less usual. In the
following remark, we can observe how central imagination is used to emphasize a claim about
inauthenticity in a film about the Civil War era. "As to the movie, where were the soldiers'
jackets??? Can you imagine walking into a band concert showing your underwear to everyone
including the Commanding General?"
20
Here imagination can point out the implausibility of the
given narrative. This example also demonstrates how imagination is rooted within a
constellation of accepted facts about history. While the film under discussion might function
appropriately as fiction with imagination serving as a support to the story, when set in the
context of this reenactors knowledge, imagination undermines the thrust of the fictional
narrative. The story is no longer about the characters attending a concert but about the imagined
embarrassment of inappropriate clothing.
While improved acentral imagining of the past being better able to construct a
cognitively and affectively comprehensible narrative is frequently the goal, central imagination
is commonly deployed as the tool for deepening and expanding narratives. Keeping in mind the
general goal of engaging in order to learn, attempting to imagine the past serves two main
purposes in the construction of historical narratives. First, what cannot be documented may be
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imagined. Engaging the imagination can help to authenticate kinds of everyday knowledge
about the past that are difficult to capture with empirical evidence. Because reenactors in
general, and especially civilian reenactors, work to represent the daily life of the period rather
than just well-documented military engagements, discovering ways to flesh out the texture of the
everyday are important. Journals help in this regard, but there are many everyday experiences
that may not be well documented in journals. Reenactors, like actors in the Euro-American
tradition generally, build roles filling in from their own feelings what cant be located in any
background study.
21
Also, as in the example above, journals cannot provide evidence for an
experience that would have been outside the realm of possible experiences for the time. If
indeed shirts were considered underwear, then wearing them as outerwear, at the very least in a
more formal public space and in the presence of women, would have been socially unthinkable.
Thus, journals are unlikely to record the potential embarrassment of such an improbable act.
Second, imagination helps a reenactor engage with the past by putting the imaginer in the
right frame of mind to have an experiential sense of history. While sometimes a reenactor might
possess relevant personal experience which can help to illuminate the past, other times cultural
changes make it difficult to apply contemporary experience. In these cases, centrally imagining
an experience can help a reenactor to better understand history. The following quote is written in
a way that stimulates the imagination in order to provide not a rational explanation (although it
does that as well) but a sense of the reason for infrequent bathing, which is cultural difference
that many reenactors claim to be unable to understand.
Let's say you're a 19
th
Century person living in the country doing physical labor 12 or 14
hours a day--plowing a field, cooking and doing laundry, or whatever. At the end of the
day, you wash up over a basin, but is it really worth filling up a tub for a bath?
Tomorrow, you're going to do the same thing all over again. There's no point in putting
20
On-line forum (1899), emphasis added
21
Schechner, 89.
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on all clean clothes in the morning, if theyll only stay clean for half an hour before they
get grimy and filthy again--why not just wear the same dirty ones again, and save on the
laundry? And if youre only going to be putting on dirty clothes again, why waste the
time cleaning yourself up jut for the few waking hours you spend in the evening around
the same people who have been doing dirty work beside you all day?
22

Washing less often might now make more sense for the imaginer because he or she can put his or
herself into the place of the farm worker and think that he or she might do the same thing in that
situation. This example differs from some of the previous examples in its use of central
imagination as a primary mode for engaging with history. It asks for a kind of emotional
simulation that is characteristic of many reenactor efforts to engage with the past.
With regard to historical imagination, however, calls to imagine most often ask the
reenactor to relate his or her own personal and affective experiences to a relevant historical
context in order to give a fuller account of the past. While there is certainly no guarantee that
personal experience will not be applied to history in an anachronistic way or that the analogies
drawn between contemporary experience and past experience will be valid, the widespread use
of imagination in understanding history nonetheless demonstrates the importance for collective
memory of the active, imaginative engagement with historical narratives. Moreover, the use of
personal experience in illuminating an unfamiliar situation is not unknown within scholarship,
especially anthropology. The trend within the discipline towards a self-reflexive style of writing
that foregrounds the subjectivity of the researcher has produced a number of well-known
examples that highlight the interplay between experience and interpretation.
23
Although the risk
within anthropological writing is significant of further displacing the dispossessed in favor of the
22
On-line forum (1902)
23
For example, see Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanzas Story (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
14

privileged ethnographer, grasping the emotional force of cultural practices is frequently a
deeply personal experience.
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Magic Moments and Imagination
While historical imagination can produce moments of understanding, another form of
non-traditional learning about the past has a higher profile within reenacting. These experiences
have a number of different names, but the most common is magic moment. As we will see
later, magic moments also involve imagination but take on an added degree of reality because
they incorporate physical elements as well. Some reenactors describe magic moments as a form
of time travel. For the duration of these moments, it really does seem to them as though they
are to some degree witnessing or even participating in life in the 1860s. Scott describes the
extent to which reenactors can possess a different type of consciousness during a magic moment.
Everything around you begins to take on a reality of that time, not this time. And you
have to keep a check on that, because thats, in a way, a kind of dangerous place to be
because you have 20
th
century concerns about safety and that sort of thing you have to be
aware of. But there is sort of the luxury at times to be able to sort of bathe into that, that
experience, and it happens in the weirdest places.

Reenactors often talk about the kinds of things that ruin a moment. These can include other
reenactors who arent taking the situation seriously as well as various types of anachronisms.
What it is that makes a moment, however, is less precise and has a less clear cut relationship to
authenticity than might be expected. Conscious awareness of inauthenticity may preclude a
magic moment, but conscious belief in the authenticity of the representations is both unnecessary
and perhaps even somewhat prohibitive. Instead, as Scott explains, there is a sense in which
you sort of have to let slip the present time to allow that, to sort of be open to that moment.
Magic moments provide affectively authentic experiences rather than authentic representations.
24
Rosaldo.
15

Consequently, the most important factor in magic moments is having some space free from
noticeably inauthentic representations even if it is within an overall context deemed largely
inaccurate. Most magic moments are not simply visual stimuli that look right thus providing a
window through which to gaze into history. Instead, they are a product of the actions and
imaginative work of reenactors. The knowledge gained from such experiences represents a kind
of ultimate authenticity within reenacting. Based upon a combination of facts, embodiment,
and imagination, insights gained through magic moments are highly valued.
Magic moments differ from historical imagination in several respects, most notably in
their involvement of the body as well as the imagination. Magic moments are periods of time
where a reenactor feels that he or she is having a full experience of the past. The ways in which
imagination is engaged also differs. Historical imagination relies primarily on an acentral form
of imagination with a hypothetical what if form of central imagination supporting insights into
the past. Magic moments go beyond this use of imagination by asking reenactors to literally put
their bodies in a simulation of the past. The embodiment of the historical narrative changes the
quality of imagination that can be deployed. Reenactors consistently talk about how their
experiences at events have given them a deeper understanding of the past than has reading alone.
While invoking the imagination when reading accounts of the war can produce engagement with
the past, embodying similar situations allows for a fuller imaginative experience.
There are two basic ways in which magic moments can be experienced. In the first type
of magic moment, the reenactment so closely approximates the original as to be almost
completely indistinguishable. In addition, there is a kind of awareness of the special quality of
the experience. The following story, which was told to me by Derek about an experience he had
at a reenactment of Gettysburg, exemplifies this type of moment.
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There were thousands of reenactors at this event. There were I think about twelve
thousand reenactors. Which is the, which is the largest event Ive ever attended up to that
time and even to this time. And, we were, as I recall, we were, we were on the offensive.
We were marching toward a Confederate entrenchment. And there were thousands of
guys. There were thousands of Confederates. You could see them. And there were
hundreds of guys with us in either direction. Just hundreds of guys. And as were
marching, I, I think I sort of felt it then. I mean, I, I could feel it. This is what it mustve
been like. There are thousands of men. There was firing. There were cannons going off.
And there were horses naying. And, you know, there was smoke and confusion. And I
think at that moment, I felt, wow. This is what it would have felt like to have actually
been there, you know, 135 years ago. You know, something like this. Everything except
the bullets whizzing by.

The layering of visual, aural and other sensory elements combined to create a scene that allowed
Derek to imagine he was surrounded by a situation out of history. Yet the experience is not only
physically realistic but affectively as well. Derek and others repeatedly emphasize in their
narratives not just that their magic moments are what the past would have looked like but what it
would have felt like. It is the addition of this affective component, created in the combination of
embodiment and imagination, that makes a moment magic. After hearing his story, I asked
Derek to describe to me when he realized he was having a magic moment.
I asked myself, I remember asking myself at that very moment. "What should you do?"
What would you do now? And my first inclination was, get the hell out of here. I've got
a wife and children. And I'm looking at these thousands of Confederates that we're
marching toward and I'm thinking to myself, what sane human being would, would stand
in these compact formations and march toward a thousand men pointing rifles at them?

Here the complexity of the imaginative work that takes place in a magic moment begins to
become clear. Embodiment is important not only for the generation of a historically relevant
experience but it also provides additional resources for imagining the past.
There are two major processes that combine to create this type of magic moment. First,
reenactors experience magic moments as intense learning experiences. In this way, magic
moments resemble more simple historical imagination. The main difference, however, is that by
placing themselves in physical situations similar to those that might have been encountered in the
17

historical context, reenactors work to create experiences which are more reliable in
understanding the past than contemporary experience used as an analogy to historical experience.
In this way, embodying the past helps reenactors to better understand the historical narrative.
Second, reenactors are not simply working to understand the past but to engage with it. In the
example above, Derek is employing a form of central imagination whereby he imagines himself
in the historical narrative in the place of the Civil War soldier, the generic historical figure
with whom he is seeking to engage. He asks himself what he would do if placed in the situation
that soldiers of the Civil War period faced. Derek and the generic soldier occupy the same
imaginative space, thus creating an imagined but strongly felt connection between them. Since
central imagination is understood to be integral to the process normally referred to as
identification, its importance in the experience of a magic moment demonstrates the significance
of the affective connection with the past that can be created through reenacting. Moreover, for
many reenactors their own feelings in the face of a magic moment serve to underscore their
appreciation for and admiration of the qualities, such as courage, loyalty and dedication, of those
who actually confronted similar situations. This affective identification fulfills at least a part of
the commemorative function of reenactments. Despite the importance of identification in this
form of magic moment, however, it does not take the form of a substitution of past for present.
As we can see through Dereks efforts to project himself into the scenario via his imagination, a
sense of the self as engaged although separate from the historical narrative is preserved in these
types of magic moments. This perspective of a contemporary observer looking at an historical
event contrasts with the other mode of experience.
In the second type of magic moment, the reenactor loses conscious knowledge of the
artifice of reenacting, thereby reacting as though participating in an actual event rather than a
18

recreated one. Among the reenactors that I spoke with, these kinds of magic moments were less
common but very powerful for those who had experienced them. The primary characteristic of
these magic moments is a response to the reenactment as though it were actually happening.
Mike highlights this shift in consciousness from acting as though the situation were real to
reacting to a situation that you take to be real.
if you're doing things and you don't have to think about it, I said, now you're a soldier.
Now you've got the feeling they had. You're not acting, you're reacting. There's just
been a lot of those moments where sometimes even without orders the guys have been
ready to charge or the guys have been ready to refuse a charge and you just have those
moments. Yeah, I usually don't notice them too much until after the fact I start thinking
about it.

Unlike the other type of magic moment where the reenactor is aware of the quality of his or her
experience at the time, these more encompassing experiences take on the illusion of reality rather
than simply heightened authenticity. Consequently, it isnt until the moment of alternate reality
has passed that the moment is recognized as having been special. The defining characteristic of
these experiences is a total identification with the historical character of the type that Smith
argues is impossible and which we can reject outright.
25
Steve told of me several instances
like the following where he was so caught up in the reenactment that he reacted with panic as the
representation became real to him for a moment.
And it happened the other time too. It was like, Im saving my butt here, you know.
Without thinking about, Oh, this is really cool, Oh, this is really cool. Maybe I should do
this or It would be cooler if I did that or Maybe I should just watch for a while. It
was just like, Im out of here, these guys are coming after us. And it could have been it
could have been a real thing, you know, and I wouldntve been any any faster gettin' out.
And that I thought was, because then when it was done, I said Oh, that was really an
experience, the panic. And you can get hurt at these things too. It's real easy to get hurt,
and that was a real good thing at that time because there were a couple of times in this
process that there were really risks of getting hurt. And I really didnt want to get hurt.
25
Smith, 80. Smith is most likely correct in arguing that this kind of identification is impossible in the film-viewing
context. This difference of response between reenacting and narrative fiction further highlights the unique place of
reenactments in contemporary culture. Yet even in reenactments, these experiences are more rare than other types
of engagement with history.
19

And I thought, that was probably a very natural feeling for them back then. And so I let
that take over because being brave and dying was not going to happen in any case. And
you have to be careful of what you want, you know. If you want the feeling of near
death, you know, a near death experience then, no, you probably are not going to get that
because you cant just replicate that. But you can replicate panic, confusion, fear, noise,
those kinds of things that they felt.

What this story demonstrates is that even the most extreme modes of identification require a
choice to participate.
26
Nor are they simply escapism, as the process of identifying with the
historical narrative depends upon a willingness to engage with certain affective aspects of the
experiencein this instance, fear and panic. As Steve points out, there are limits to the illusion
of reality. But within the boundaries of what is reasonable to create at an event, reenactors can
produce the experience of a reality designed to replicate history. Indeed, these types of magic
moments simply cannot occur without working to replicate an unfamiliar mindset through the
imagination.
While imagination continues to play an important part in the creation of these
experiences, the embodiment of other lifeways is of even greater importance than for other types
of interaction with the past that rely most heavily on imagination. Particularly important is the
role of habituated behavior. By regularly recreating past lifeways, reenactors become able to
enact patterns of behavior with little conscious thought or effort that might otherwise command
attention, thereby keeping the focus on the distance between past and present. Among the
reenactors that I worked with, it was consistently more experienced reenactors who reported this
second type of magic moment. They had replicated the experiences of the period enough that
they had begun to seem a part of their own experience. Military drills comprise the clearest
example of these habituated behaviors. Consequently, this type of magic moment usually takes
26
There is one type of magic moment that does not seem to require willing participation in the creation of the
experience moments that are experienced as encounters with ghosts or other visions of the past. Even in these
instances, however, I only spoke with one person who was displeased with her interaction with the past.
20

place in military situations, especially within the context of a recreated battle.
Naturally, some magic moments can happen in other situations as well. In fact, Scott
argues that few of his magic moments come during battle scenarios, Because during the battles
Im thinking, well, they werent really there. They were over here. Why are you guys going
around that way? For him, deviations from his historical knowledge of the battles keep his
attention in the present, preempting the possibility of experiencing an encounter with the past.
Nonetheless, all of the stories I heard of magic moments outside military scenarios were of the
first, less encompassing type. Both types of magic moments, however, can lead to an embodied
knowledge that differs in production from other types of historical knowledge. As weve seen in
all the examples in this paper, imagination is a crucial component in making engagement with
history possible. It is imaginative work that heightens physical restored behavior into a magic
moment by imbuing it with the necessary affective significance.
Identification and Connection in Collective Memory
Magic moments are periods of time in which, through heightened physical response and
both central and acentral imaginative work, reenactors have a seemingly natural affective
response to their situation. They come to identify with history. What, however, is the
significance of these moments for collective memory? First of all, magic moments reveal why
reenactors choose to recreate the past rather than commemorating it in some other way. As
Steve put it, you know, you still get that real, oh, man, this is -- it still goes to your heart and
theres still a little bit of excitement there. And you think, now I know kind of why I do this.
Reenactments can move people like few other representations of history.
The second reason that magic moments are important for collective memory is they suggest
that people can experience collective memory as not a justification of the state or legitimation of
21

an ideological position, but as a way of creating a kind of bond and connecting through time to a
community of individuals within whom you feel yourself associated. The results of that bond, of
course, may in fact have a variety of both positive and negative consequences. However, affect
cannot be ruled detrimental without looking at its specific effects. For example, Scott finds in
his affective connection to the past important reasons for being politically active in an era of
decreasing interest and attention to civic life. He said,
I dont care if theyve got the right hat on. Look what they did. How can you say, "Its
raining. I dont care. Im not gonna go vote." Or in the weeks preceding [an election],
"Im not going to read the paper and inform myself".I want them to understand that it
cost people their lives. They are inheriting a real wealth.

Interestingly, in this example, Scott judges the affective response to history more important than
strict authenticity. As we have seen in other instances in this paper, the ability of the moment to
generate an emotional and physical response is often more important than attributions of
authenticity to the surrounding details of the representation. Moreover, magic moments are
authentic even though they are unverifiable and dont refer back to a specific instance of
history, which is typically the type of criteria looked for by reenactors. Affect is generally
considered off-limits with regard to producing authentic history. However, for reasons that I
go into shortly, the language of authenticity is not used to describe magic moments and
consequently, affect is not disdained in this context.
The significance of an affective connection with the past also helps partly explain the
focus on commemorating individuals. Historical narratives are much more immediate and more
easily imagined when focused on an individual. Scott told me the story of a moment he had with
a group of other men while on the site of a Civil War field hospital.
We were down in the bottom where they stable the horses and all, and up above us where
the hay was. Now, the whole barn was used as a hospital. And were sitting there
filming this thing right where they had the hospital. Were doing the hospital scene. And
22

were laying there, and some of the kids are joking around, stuff like that, and, you know,
you do that on movie sets, just because you wait so much. But it dawned on me as we
were sitting there, you know, this is, this is where it happened, this is where guys died.
And I turned to a couple of them next to me, and I said, Hey, guys, you know, it just
dawned on me. Look up. Thats the last thing that some men ever saw on this earth, was
those very boards right there, these walls, these stones. Thats the last they ever saw.
And everybody got real quiet, like, whoa. And, you know, after a while, everybody
started throwing straw around, goofing off like you do. But there is that sense of this is --
I dont want to take it too far --but there is a sense in which this is sacred.

This narrative again gives a clear sense of the impact of the experience and how imagination can
build an affective connection to a hypothesized figure from the past.
At reenactments, collective memory shapes communities both through interactions in the
present with each other and interactions with the past. We may not live in the past, but the past
is nevertheless a part of us in that we use it to define who were are in the present. The
affective connection and sense of continuity with the past, however, makes that link even
stronger. In a sense, just as technology allows for a sense of community that is not
geographically limited, reenacting allows for a feeling of community that is not limited
temporally. Schechner discusses this feeling of an other coming to seem intricately tied to
ourselves as a central feature of restored behavior.
Elements that are not me become me without losing their not me-ness.While
performing, [the performer] no longer has a me but has a not not me, and this double
negative relationship also shows how restored behavior is simultaneously private and
social.
27

In other words, the reenactor experiences an us through magic moments. The dual quality of
magic moments as both private and social also begins to explain why these experiences are not
talked about with the language of authenticity. They are social because they relate us to others
within a framework of community. But they are private both in the fact that they are experienced
alone and also in that they are not open to debate over their accuracy. To talk about authenticity
27
Schechner, 112.
23

is to imply the existence of inauthenticity. Yet there is no such thing as an inauthentic magic
moment. Magic moments have a quality of certainty about them, although they may be ruined
by a reenactor becoming aware of the intrusion of some inauthenticity into their experience. For
their duration, however, they show reenactors what must have been and are talked about in the
language of the real rather than the language of the authentic. Magic moments are private
because they can only ever be narrated my private experience which you may hear but may not
speak about rather than shared through disagreement and discussion an experience we may
all evaluate.
Conclusion
Looking closely at magic moments illustrates an important way in which collective
memory is experienced within reenacting. In addition to forging a community through
discussion and debate, reenactors also forge feelings of community through imaginatively
engaging with historical narratives. In this way, experiences of collective memory can actually
be very private moments of affective significance. Yet the ultimately unshared quality of
identification with history can bolster the dialogic component of public memory as well.
Because reenactments bring out strong feelings, with narrative engagement comes the possibility
for engaging with others in the present moment, too. If affect is considered inappropriate,
however, then those feelings will not make it into open discussion, but that does not mean that
the simple creation of those feelings is necessarily detrimental in all discursive contexts.
While the private, affective experience of collective memory is not necessarily
problematic, there are, however, at least two issues that impact its effects. The first issue is the
focus on individuals. Narratives of individuals are useful and important for engagement with
history, but these narratives need to be set within a context to make them meaningful.
24

Reenactors, for example, are typically more focused on individual experience than social
structure and societal systems. Many stories deal with the cost to individuals in fear, in suffering
and sometimes in their lives. The private nature of magic moments can exacerbate this focus on
the individual. Mikes narrative illustrates the potential of magic moments to literally isolate
individuals from interaction with others.
We're waking up. You could just see little flickers every now and then, not very many of
them, of fires down the company streets. And there's just this mist. And all you see is
kind of like this ghost, specter images, of Confederate troops, moving, forming up into
regiments, and forming their battalions. And, if you were marching you can't see more
than 10, 15 feet in front of you clearly. And we're marching over this field. All of a
sudden we halt. We're thrown into a line and we're on top of a ridge, and there's 20
Confederate cannons up on the ridge. You just see this white square. It's a cornfield with
a fence in the front. For the next 30 minutes we're sitting there with this continuous
artillery barrage that's shaking the ground. You couldn't talk to somebody next to you.
The ground was shaking, just moving. Then all of a sudden we get the order Go
forward and we are literally marching forward, not being able to see what's in front of
us. All of a sudden we're just face-to-face with the Federal line. And it's just kind of this,
you just, forgot where you were and what you were doing, and just, both lines got
together and stopped.

From the beginning of the experience where he was unable to see others, to the artillery battle
where it was impossible to speak, the environment of the reenacted battled here works to isolate
reenactors within their own experience. Moreover, these experiences are rarely related in a way
that brings the social and political context of the Civil War into account. This lack, however, is
less indicative of the type of knowledge than it is of the strategies of the reenacting community
for dealing with fundamental disagreement and controversy about the past.
Finally, relying on imagination also means relying on the present to a large extent. What
people are able and willing to imagine is determined by their present preconceptions about the
past and their willingness to entertain different viewpoints. Highly charged issues or deeply felt
notions about the past may preclude some people from engaging in an imaginative, experiential
interaction with the past. The confederate battle flag offers one such example of a symbol from
25

the past whose meaning is highly contentious in the present. We might expect to find more
people unwilling to play with their ideas about that flag. One reenactor who researched the
earliest flags and found some surprising information about the material out of which they were
constructed wrote, "What a neat thing, confederates with battleflags ranging from coral pink to
shimmering salmonBut there are a lot of guys who were really offended by the idea of
anything other than a blood red flag."
28
To these other "guys", a different look to the battle flag
did not match their preconceived notions about the flag. The thought of carrying such a flag felt
offensive to them because they could not effectively imagine or experience this alternative vision
of history. This example shows how at times affective authenticity claims can be more important
than fact-based authenticity claims. The meaning of the flag in the present was too strong to
accept any other historical interpretation regardless of its claim to authenticity.
A similar but less controversial example is that of the bathing issue. One reenactor wrote
that "I can truly say..[body odor] is not one aspect in which I personally want to be accurate
on"
29
She had no desire to engage in experiential learning with regard to the changing norms of
bodily cleanliness. There are limits to experiential learning, but they may not be what critics of
popular history claim they are. Engaging people's emotions provides a different type of
knowledge that is not unvaluable and may even provide a form of critical perspective on the
present. The disadvantage, however, is that experiential learning relies on the learner and his or
her willingness to learn perhaps even more than traditional learning.

28
On-line forum (1874)
29
On-line forum (1910)
26
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