Friday, April 29, 2011

And I'm off!

As part of this blog I will be keeping you abreast of my wonderful adventures as a reenactor.  I’m off this afternoon to Neshaminy State Park just outside Philadelphia for the weekend for a reenactment (a real one with a battle as opposed to a living history).  We’ll be reenacting the battles of Ball’s Bluff and Bolivar Heights.
I’m all packed and ready for a good weekend.  I’ll have a post action report for you when I return.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Welcome

I’ve been struggling to work out what I should write for my first post, and decided it would be best to introduce myself a little, even to those of you who already know me, and to explain why I reenact, why I started this blog and what I hope to accomplish. 
Growing up in Northern Virginia my parents took me to a few reenactments as well as numerous museums and historic sites.  From an early age I had an interest in the past.  I remember looking at photographs of Civil War soldiers.  I wanted to know about their lives, what they ate, where they lived, what were their hopes and dreams.  The toils of these nameless young men staring back at me have largely been forgotten, often buried in history texts books under names of politicians and generals.  These were the men who suffered the horrors of war, watching their friends, many who they had grown up with, die before their eyes.  They were the men who marched twenty miles a day through the deep mud, eating moldy and spoiled food, and suffered from disease that spread like wildfire through the camps. 
We are a society that unfortunately often undervalues our history.  I’ve continuously been shocked at the number of Americans who don’t know the difference between the Civil War and the Revolution for example.  Yet it is our history that makes us who we are and the Civil War in particular was instrumental in shaping our modern society.  If we lose the connection to those people we lose part of our selves, part of our identity as a nation.  I’ve personally always felt that living history allows the public to interact not with names and dates but with the people of the war and their experiences, even if only by proxies.  And that is essentially what I see myself as, a proxy for those soldiers.  I hope that by doing this I can help people connect with the past in some meaningful way.  I know that for me it was going to reenactments as a child which fostered my love of history, and I hope that I can foster that same love in the public. 
I started reenacting when I was eleven as a drummer.  Because I was so young my father joined me.  When I was twelve my family moved to Colorado where I joined the 1st Colorado Infantry.  As the group became more progressive I too evolved my impression (how I portray a Civil War soldier from the uniform to my speech and mannerism), putting more emphasis on authenticity.  Recently, after a hiatus of several years, I’ve started reenacting again with the 69th New York here in New York City.  I see myself as a progressive in the true sense of the word, my impression is evolving and becoming consistently better the more I learn and the more I work on it. 
I decided to start this blog because I felt that quite often reenactors are misrepresented and misunderstood by our society.  Our fascination with such a terrible period in American history is questioned, with some people suggesting we “fetishize” the war.  Some suggest our interest in history is a waste of time (a problem I’ve also encountered with my studies in ancient Egypt).  Others question what they see as essentially play acting, often viewing reenactors and living historians as little more than Live Action Role Players.  Some see a “backwards” outlook and even racism as being at the core of the hobby, often associating reenactors with “white trash.”  All of these assertions are off the mark, at least in my experiences and I hope to use this blog to dispel these beliefs.  I’ll talk about what we as reenactors do both on and off the field, and who we are as a community.  In addition I’ll talk about my experiences with reenacting and my ongoing struggle to improve my impression.  I’m less likely to present research articles that reenactors are so fond of, or the accompanying “how to” articles (such as the correct unit stencils for your knapsack) although these may occur every once in a while.  While these resources are indispensible they’re simply not the focus of this blog.   
Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog,
Patrick C. Salland
Me at the Irish Brigade Memorial at Gettysburg