Finding Your Community and Going Further

Identify where the living-history community discusses interpretation technique on an ongoing basis.

Locate training, certification, and conference opportunities for professional development beyond this book.

Locate further reading that goes deeper than this book on specific topics it introduced.

Evaluate community sources — blogs, forums, and social media groups — with the same critical eye applied to any historical source.

This book is an introduction, not the last word. First-person interpretation is a living practice, refined constantly by people doing the actual work at actual sites, and most of what's genuinely useful to know next lives in that ongoing conversation rather than in any single book — including this one. This chapter is a map to where that conversation happens.

Blogs and Sites Referenced Throughout This Book

Several sources cited in earlier chapters are worth following directly rather than only through this book's summary of them:

The Modern Reenactor — the source for this book's opening-technique discussion in Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest: In the Field; worth reading in full for its broader thinking on visitor engagement mechanics.
History Preserved — a clear-eyed articulation of first person's structural limitations, cited in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard; useful to revisit whenever you want to pressure-test your own commitment to the method rather than take it for granted.
I'm Living History — the source for the "in-between" hybrid approach discussed in Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest: In the Field and Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly.
Townsends' Living History Personas guide — a practical starting reference for civilian persona-building, foundational to Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up.
18th Century Material Culture Resource Center — portraiture, artifact breakdowns, and visual research to ground the material choices covered in Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture.
Passion for the Past — Ken Farrell's long-running documentation of seasonal, task-based living history, central to Chapter 7. Daily Rhythms and Domestic Tradecraft.
K. Walters at the Sign of the Gray Horse — open-hearth cookery and domestic material culture tied to a specific, documented household, also cited in Chapter 7. Daily Rhythms and Domestic Tradecraft.
Two Nerdy History Girls — deep, object-and-document-level social history, cited in Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up and Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture.
Journal of the American Revolution — a substantial ongoing archive of primary-source-grounded research, including Don N. Hagist's work on common soldiers and working-class life, cited throughout Chapters 2, 3, and 8.

Caution: Treat blogs and community writing the way this book has treated every other source: useful, often excellent, but written by individuals with their own site's context, their own period focus, and their own opinions. A technique that works beautifully at one site's format may need real adaptation for yours. Cross-check anything load-bearing against the more rigorously sourced references below.

Finding Other Interpreters

Living history is easier to learn inside a community than alone. Two kinds of resources are worth seeking out:

Directories of active groups, such as the Living History Archive's directory of eighteenth-century reenactment groups, for finding civilian and military units in your region to learn from, volunteer with, or simply observe.
Discussion communities, most active today on Facebook, organized around progressively more specific focuses — from high-fidelity research and primary-source citation, to site operations and event logistics, to civilian personas and domestic social customs specifically. Search current Facebook groups directly for terms like "18th century living history," "progressive reenacting," and "18th century civilian living history" — group membership, activity, and moderation quality shift over time, so a search at the time you're looking will serve you better than any name or link fixed in a book.

Tip: When you join a new community, spend real time reading before posting. Every one of these spaces has its own accumulated norms about sourcing standards, tone, and how much disagreement is welcome — norms that take a while to absorb and are easy to violate by accident.

Breaking In: From Hobby to Vocation

For anyone hoping to turn this from a hobby into paid work — a real vocation, however small a share of the professional living-history world actually operates that way — Nat Lasley's own path is a useful, concrete model. He started with odd jobs, one of which happened to be at a small local historic house looking to start a modest historical theater program; he volunteered there, built a tight, primary-source-grounded persona and a prepared short presentation, and asked to come back. Each successive site became a credential toward the next, larger one, eventually leading to Colonial Williamsburg. His practical advice for anyone starting the same way: find small, under-resourced sites that genuinely need volunteers rather than aiming straight for a flagship institution, offer a short, well-prepared piece rather than an open-ended commitment, and let a track record of reliable, well-researched work accumulate site by site rather than trying to skip straight to the top.109

Training, Certification, and Conferences

Beyond informal community and reading, a handful of structured professional-development paths are worth knowing about specifically:

The National Association for Interpretation (NAI), introduced in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard, runs certification programs (Certified Interpretive Guide, Certified Interpretive Trainer, and others) built on Tilden's principles, along with an annual national workshop and regional conferences. Its certification and training resources are open to interpreters well beyond the parks and natural-history contexts NAI originally grew from.110
The International Museum Theatre Alliance (IMTAL), founded by Catherine Hughes (whose book is discussed below), is the principal professional network specifically for museum theater and first-person/character-based interpretation practitioners, drawing members from art, science, and history museums, historic sites, and zoos alike. Its membership and events information is a good next stop for anyone whose interpretation leans toward the scripted, performance end of the spectrum discussed in Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest: In the Field.
The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), whose broader education and interpretation resources were cited in Chapter 12. Working a Crowd: Groups, Children, and Hard Questions: Working a Crowd, holds an annual conference with a substantial interpretation and living-history track.
Individual sites' own professional development offerings — many major living-history museums run their own teacher institutes, interpreter training weeks, and specialist workshops (on topics from open-hearth cooking to African American interpretation specifically) that are open, for a fee, to interpreters from other institutions. These are frequently the single highest-value training opportunity available, precisely because they're taught by people doing the specific work day to day rather than teaching in the abstract.

If you're building a training pipeline for new interpreters at your own site rather than seeking one out elsewhere, it helps to have a concrete model in mind rather than inventing one from scratch. One established program's approach — as Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, describes hers — offered here as one illustrative shape rather than a required template: every new hire, regardless of eventual role, starts with the same general orientation to the site's history and period before ever being assigned to a specific interpretive unit; from there, a new interpreter shadows an experienced one, then moves to scripted "fourth-wall" scenes — microphone on for the scene itself, off once it ends — before finally working unscripted, first paired with a partner and only later alone. In this program, that progression typically runs six to nine months before an interpreter is trusted to work completely solo, and closer to a year before they've rotated through enough pairings and persona types to have the full range this book has been building toward. Adapt the shape, not the exact timeline, to whatever scale your own site can actually support.111

Professional development is also worth pursuing outside living history entirely. Visiting other museums broadly — not just other living-history sites, but art museums in particular — repays deliberate effort, because every different interpretive medium is a transferable tool even when the subject matter has nothing to do with your own period. How does a gallery docent make a guest feel something specific from a painting on a wall, with no task, no costume, and no first-person voice to lean on at all? That's a real interpretive technique, developed under real constraints, and it's easy to settle for the first approach you happen to see work at your own site, as Pittman puts it, rather than actively seeking out how a completely different kind of institution solves the same underlying problem.112

Foundational Reading Beyond This Book

A fuller list of works that go deeper than this book could, organized by the chapter they connect to most closely:

On the theory and history of interpretation and living history (see Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard):

Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (University of North Carolina Press, 1957) — the foundational text of interpretive theory generally.
Stacy F. Roth, Past into Present: Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation (University Press of New England, 1998) — the most sustained academic treatment specifically of first-person technique.
Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (American Association for State and Local History, 1984) — the field's most-cited early survey.
Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance (Scarecrow Press, 2007) — a more academic, performance-studies treatment of what living history claims to do.
Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (Routledge, 2004) — the education-research literature on "historical empathy" underlying first person's central pedagogical claim.

On research method and material culture (see Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up and Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture):

Val D. Greenwood, The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy (Genealogical Publishing Co.) — court, land, and probate records in practical depth.
Linda Baumgarten and John Watson, Costume Close-Up: Clothing Construction and Pattern, 1750–1790 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1999) — garment construction at the level of real evidence.
Sandra L. Oliver, Food in Colonial and Federal America (Greenwood Press, 2005) — foodways across the social spectrum.
Don N. Hagist, British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution (Westholme Publishing, 2012) — working-class and military lives reconstructed from primary sources.

On voice and language (see Chapter 4. Finding Your Character's Voice):

18th Century English for History Interpreters (this series) — the full linguistic treatment this book only bridges to.
Suzanne Romaine, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV: 1776–1997 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) — the scholarly linguistics behind the companion volume.
John R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications (Blackwell, 1999).

On station, race, and bondage (see Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage):

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (The New Press, 2006).
Slavery and Remembrance, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's UNESCO-partnered digital resource on sites and stories of memory connected to slavery worldwide.

On improvisation, museum theater, and the emotional demands of the work (see Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest: In the Field, Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly, and Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression):

Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963).
Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell, Sanford Meisner on Acting (Vintage Books, 1987) — foundational actor training in discipline and moment-to-moment truthfulness, recommended in Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression as a starting point outside living history specifically.
Jeff Wirth, Interactive Acting: Acting, Improvisation, and Interacting for Audience Participatory Theatre (Fall Creek Press, 1994) — techniques specific to audience-participatory performance, also recommended in Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression.
Catherine Hughes, Museum Theatre: Communicating with Visitors through Drama (Heinemann, 1998).
John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience (Whalesback Books, 1992).
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 1983).
Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Basic Books, 1983).

Note: Magelssen writes from performance studies rather than history or museum education specifically, so his framing will feel different — more theoretical, more concerned with what a performance of "the past" actually claims to do — than the practitioner-oriented sources elsewhere in this list. Read him after, not instead of, the more hands-on references above.

With this map in hand, close out with the Chapter 16. Quick-Reference Appendix — a condensed set of templates and checklists distilled from every chapter, meant to live in your bag or your notebook, not on a shelf.