Living History shows how different groups of Americans, each armed with their own version of the past, deal with the history of the American Civil War and the legacy of slavery through re-enactment.
The ongoing project was awarded the Zilveren Camera Documentair International 2019.
As soon as the Civil War ended, veterans organized re-enactments to rebuild national unity between the former Confederacy and Union states. Today thousands of highly motivated ‘living historians’ live out their version of what it must have been like to live and fight during ‘the war that forged the nation’. It is their way of being in touch with their ancestry and history.
Many of today’s southern re-enactors are drawn to the Civil War through a romanticized and heroic version of history, largely ignoring the issue of slavery; the so-called ‘Lost Cause Narrative’. Some ‘Living Historians’ fight with such vigour that they seem to want to change the outcome of the war, proclaiming that the ‘South will rise again’.
The idea that the North fought a moral war against slavery, which became an important part of the national narrative, is also a problematic notion. This is shown by, amongst other things, the lack of plans to fully include the former enslaved people into American society as citizens.
Artist Dread Scott organised the ‘Slave Rebellion Re-enactment’ in 2019. The performance re-enacted the German Coast uprising of 1811, the largest slave rebellion in American history. The re-enactors sought to reclaim the historic narrative of slavery. It also created a transformative experience for the participants, walking the same path as their ancestors walked in the fatal pursuit of their freedom.