About Us

About Living Histories

Living histories is meant entirely for education of the public. We aim to help you gain the knowledge of the things you need to know when entering into the world of living historys and reenactment.

You can think of us as a great portal site with not just links to places of interest, but a valuable resource tool that has collectively gathered information and provides you with both descriptions and links to various places of interest in the living history, reenactmetn, and fatasy group world.

We want you to truely understand the mindset of an individulal portraying the life, and more importantly the lifestyle, of people of any period in time. Your reasons may be different from others, be it a facination with history, educational, wanting to learn a new skill or craft, or you just want to get all dressed up in funny clothes, but chances are, if you are interested in reenactments, you share a very particular commonality with someone of the same interest.

Why We Reenact?

There are many answers to the question: Why do we reenact? There are probably as many answers as there are reenactors. Most reenact at least partially because of a love of history, or at the very least love of something from the time period in question, be it clothing or furniture or weapons or ideology.

If asked, most reenactors will tell you that they do it to educate the public. A few brutally honest souls will tell you we do it so we can dress up and pretend to be from somewhere else for a while.

Reenactment as a hobby follows trends. Some reenactors do one impression for their entire time in the hobby. However many of us branch out into other time periods as the trends change. As old favourites get less popular and there are fewer and fewer events, we're almost forced to change time periods if we want to keep going to events.

As much as we shudder to admit it, these trends are often fueled by what's popular at the box office. Hollywood has long been the bane of reenactors ? getting myriad details wrong and often changing historical details to make a "better" story ? but it remains the driving force behind the trends in reenactment. After Braveheart, everyone wanted to be in a kilt; The Patriot did the same thing for the Revolutionary War reenactments; Master and Commander made maritime reenacting the thing of the time; and of course the Pirates of the Carribean franchise has excited an interest in the Golden Age of Piracy.

As reenactors, are we mere slaves to Hollywood's quasi-historical trends? Absolutely Not! Though as particular time periods come to the notice of the general public, interest is per force generated in that period. While this creates a plethora of Jack Sparrows at the Ren Faire, it has a positive effect as well. Historical sites also want to capitalize on these trends. This leads to the generation of more events and, therefore, more opportunities for us to reenact events from that time period.

Furthermore just like Jurassic Park generated an interest in archeology that lead to the discover of new fossil bones, effectively doubling the number of T. Rex skeletons extant, the general public's interest in historical time periods, engendered by movies, increases interest in real historical sites and the events that occured at them. This can only serve to stimulate much-needed donations to those often under-funded historical sites.

So the sites get more money, we get more events, and the public gets a chance to learn about the real history of the time period, not just the one perpetuated by Hollywood. Everyone wins!

If in all of your perosonal research you happen to find a site that you belive is a valuable resouce or one that you would like to see on this site, please feel free to contact us with the site address and a brief description and we shall review the entry and more than likely place the resouce in its appropriate location. More...