Why First Person, and Why It's Hard

Define first-person historical interpretation and distinguish it from third-person and museum-theater approaches.

Explain the core case for first person as a teaching method, and the strongest objections raised against it.

Situate first-person interpretation within the broader history and professional literature of heritage interpretation.

State the guiding principle I use to decide when first person serves a guest and when it gets in the way.

A costumed interpreter steps out from behind a split-rail fence, looks a visitor in the eye, and says, "Good morrow to you — will you not come in and sit a while?" In that instant she has made a choice with real consequences: she is not describing 1774, she is claiming to live there. Everything she says next, every question a guest asks, has to be answered from inside that claim. That is first-person interpretation, and it is one of the hardest, most rewarding tools in the whole living-history toolbox.

I wrote this book to help you do that well. I assume you already have — or are building — a base of period knowledge: the material culture of your role, the historical events around it, and, if you're portraying an eighteenth-century American, the way people of your character's station actually spoke.

What First Person Actually Is

Living history sites generally recognize three broad interpretive modes, and it's worth being precise about the differences because they get blurred constantly in casual conversation:

Third-person interpretation. You wear the clothing and may perform the tasks of the past, but you speak as yourself, in the present tense, about people who are not you: "Colonial women typically rose before dawn to start the hearth fire." You can answer any modern question directly, compare past to present, and use hindsight freely.
First-person interpretation. You are the character. You speak in the first person, from within the character's own moment, with no knowledge of anything that hasn't happened yet: "I rose before light this morning, as I do every morning, to see to the fire." A guest's modern question has to be answered — or deflected — from inside that same frame.
Museum theater / hybrid interpretation. A scripted or semi-scripted scene, often performed to an audience rather than with individual guests, that may step in and out of character deliberately, narrate asides, or blend first- and third-person address within the same presentation.

Note: This is a companion volume to 18th Century English for History Interpreters, which covers period vocabulary, grammar, and register in depth. Where a chapter here touches on language, I'll point you there rather than repeat that material.

Townsends' persona guide, a widely used starting reference for civilian reenactors, frames the choice between first and third person as a matter of comfort and goal rather than a hierarchy. Its own convention is worth knowing precisely: in third person you refer to the historical figures around you using "they/them," speaking about a role you've researched rather than becoming it, while first person asks you to "know a lot in order to be able to speak with authority" and sustain that knowledge under real conversational pressure using "I/me." 1 Neither is more legitimate than the other; they are different tools for different jobs, and many interpreters use both in the course of a single day depending on the audience in front of them, switching registers the way a tour guide might shift from narrating a building's history to answering a direct question about it.

Note: A useful test for telling first and third person apart in the moment: if a guest can ask "what did people back then think about X" and get a direct, hindsight-informed answer, you're in third person. If the only honest answer to that question is your own character's opinion, delivered as though the rest of history hasn't happened yet, you're in first person.

Within first-person interpretation itself, it's worth distinguishing what Nat Lasley, who has portrayed Patrick Henry at Colonial Williamsburg since 2025, calls reenacting from first-person acting. A reenactor's focus is the event and its material world — the march, the camp, the uniform's stitching — as one contributor to a larger, collectively painted picture of a moment in time. A first-person actor's focus is narrower and more personal: a specific individual's life story, plausibly recreated, with clothing and language important but secondary to that story. Both live inside this book's "first-person interpretation" category, but they're pulling toward different centers of gravity, and it's worth knowing which one your own portrayal leans toward. 2

A Short History of the Method

First-person interpretation is not a recent invention, but it professionalized considerably over the second half of the twentieth century, as a small number of flagship sites built it into a deliberate, resourced discipline rather than an occasional stunt. Plimoth Plantation (now Plimoth Patuxet Museums) became one of the method's most influential laboratories starting in the 1970s, training interpreters to sustain researched seventeenth-century personas for an entire visitor day. Colonial Williamsburg built its own parallel tradition, eventually formalizing a roster of costumed historians — today organized under its Nation Builders program — who portray real historical figures from eighteenth-century Williamsburg in sustained, first-person conversation with visitors. 3

The scholar who did the most to give this whole field a shared vocabulary and a critical eye was Jay Anderson, whose 1984 book Time Machines: The World of Living History remains the field's most-cited starting point.4 Anderson identified three overlapping communities within living history: people using it as a public teaching tool (which is my whole concern here), people using it as a research method to test historical claims about how objects and processes actually worked, and hobbyists building personal "history buff" personas mainly for their own engagement with the past. First-person interpretation, as I treat it here, sits mostly in the first category, but borrows constantly from the second — a persona's material culture and daily task, covered in Chapters 5 and 7, are only convincing when they're grounded in the same kind of experimental rigor Anderson's second group specializes in.

The Case For It

Done well, first person does something third-person interpretation structurally cannot: it removes the safety rail of hindsight. A third-person guide can always retreat to "of course, we know now that..." — a comfortable modern vantage point that keeps the past at arm's length. A first-person interpreter cannot. She has to defend, from the inside, opinions a modern audience may find genuinely uncomfortable — on politics, on religion, on the people her character owns, hires, or answers to — without the narrator's escape hatch of foreknowledge.

That constraint is the whole value of the exercise. It forces a guest to reckon with the past as something people actually believed, not just something that happened. A visitor who hears a third-person guide explain that "many Virginians believed slavery was compatible with Christian morality" nods and moves on. A visitor who has to argue the point with a first-person interpreter who actually holds that view — calmly, coherently, from inside a real historical logic — leaves unsettled in a way a lecture rarely achieves. That unsettling is not a bug. Handled with the care I insist on throughout (see Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage and Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly), it is first person's single greatest educational asset.5

Lasley describes the core of the method's appeal in almost physical terms: there is something "breathing the same air" as a historical figure does for a guest that no book or documentary can replace, precisely because it is a real, present encounter rather than a recorded one. He pairs that with a stated professional obligation that this book has argued for throughout under a different name: interpreters, in his words, "bear a sacred trust to tell the truth," and either exaggerating or sugarcoating a figure's negative qualities is "a form of lying" either way. That combination — an irreplaceable experience, held to an uncompromising standard of honesty — is the whole bargain this book asks you to keep.

First person also does something subtler that's easy to overlook: it puts the burden of historical thinking on the guest rather than the guide. A third-person lecture hands visitors a conclusion. A first-person conversation hands them a person to reason about, and lets them arrive at their own conclusion — about how strange, how familiar, how understandable or unforgivable that person's worldview actually is. Visitors routinely report remembering a good first-person conversation far longer, and in far more concrete detail, than an equivalent third-person talk on the same topic, precisely because they did some of the interpretive work themselves rather than receiving it prepackaged. Helping visitors have an experience with the past involves fundamental processes of human learning in a way that receiving summaries or explanations simply can't.6

I recall vividly my initial personal interaction with a first-person history interpreter. In the summer of 2003, my wife, three young children, and I made our first trip to Colonial Williamsburg. The temperature was in the low nineties with a relative humidity in the upper eighties — not deadly but uncomfortable. As we walked into the historic district, we approached a costumed interpreter seated on a bench, I was amazed to see him in a three-piece suit because we had shed every article of clothing that common modesty allowed. I asked him "Aren't you hot in that suit?" His response: "I find white linen to be the most cooling of fabrics, don't you?" Not yet familiar with the opportunity he was offering to engage in an eighteenth-century conversation, and ill-equipped to do so, I simply responded, "indeed" and we continued our walk. That I recall details of that brief interaction after more than two decades signals to me that the first-person approach to helping folks engage with the past holds something special.

The Case Against It

The strongest critiques of first person aren't about execution — they're structural, and a serious interpreter should sit with them rather than dismiss them.

The essayist behind History Preserved's widely shared piece on the "dilemma" of first-person interpretation makes four objections worth taking seriously.7 First, that claiming to be a historical person is a kind of performance dishonesty, since both interpreter and guest know it isn't true — she describes feeling like "a bald-faced liar" when visitors questioned whether she actually lived in the historical setting. Second, that true authenticity is impossible because the interpreter cannot un-know two and a half centuries of hindsight and modern reflexes. Third, that staying rigidly in character limits how directly you can actually teach — her own sharpest example is the absurdity of calling a guest's camera a "box with a bright flash" rather than simply explaining what a camera is and how photography works, a workaround so strained it teaches the guest nothing except that the interpreter is committed to a bit. Fourth, that the whole exercise can reinforce a vague, almost magical idea of "time travel" rather than sober historical understanding.

Her own preferred alternative — third-person, hands-on "experimental" interpretation where guests spin wool, cook a period recipe, or try a period game while a guide explains what they're feeling — trades first person's emotional immediacy for something more durable: direct sensory and physical understanding that doesn't depend on anyone successfully performing an illusion.8

A related, more practical objection comes from the Modern Reenactor blog's discussion of visitor engagement: when a guest is dropped into a first-person conversation with no warning and no way out, the experience can produce anxiety rather than curiosity — the visitor feels obligated to "indulge their solo performance like it's normal," as one teacher's comment on the piece put it — and that pressure crowds out actual learning. The blog goes further than most first-person advocates are willing to: its author writes of personally preferring to avoid strict first person entirely when possible, connecting modern examples to historical concepts instead of asking guests to suspend disbelief about who they're talking to. The blog's constructive suggestion — that museums explicitly advertise which encounters are interactive and use an opt-in signal, like a sticker a visitor can choose to wear, so guests knowingly consent to first-person engagement rather than stumbling into it — is a concrete, low-cost fix worth adopting at any site that can manage it.9

On that first family trip to Colonial Williamsburg, I recall being mildly frustrated a time or two at not being able to get a straight answer when questioning a first-person interpreter about a topic that required knowledge of events past the eighteenth century. I felt unfulfilled because I was certain that the interpreter knew the answer, yet he refused to impart it.

Caution: None of these critiques is an argument for abandoning first person — it's an argument for using it deliberately. A first-person interpretation with no opt-in signal, no way to ask a plain question, and no interpreter judgment about when to step outside the frame is genuinely worse than good third-person interpretation. This section seeks to help you avoid that failure mode, not to talk you out of the method.

A Note on the Sources

You will have noticed by now that some of the strongest material in this chapter — the "bald-faced liar" line, the sticker-as-consent proposal, Townsends' pronoun convention — comes not from a peer-reviewed journal or a museum's official training manual, but from blogs.10 11 That's deliberate, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than letting it pass unremarked: these are interpreters, docents, and reenactors writing about their own work in public, on their own time, with no editor smoothing the account into something more presentable — and that makes them some of the most useful material a new interpreter can find, because they show the craft as it is actually practiced rather than as it is supposed to work.

Academic literature and institutional guidelines have their place, and I lean on both — Tilden, Anderson, and Barton and Levstik all appear because their frameworks hold up and because a serious interpreter should know the field's canon. But that literature is written after the fact, at a remove, for an audience of colleagues and reviewers. It rarely tells you what it actually feels like to stand in a doorway in a linen cap and have a twelve-year-old ask if you're a robot, or to realize mid-sentence that the "authentic" answer to a guest's question is going to sound evasive and a little absurd. A blog post written by someone who did that an hour ago, and is still turning it over, tells you that. The essayist behind History Preserved did not set out to write a balanced literature review of first-person methodology; she set out to describe why a specific afternoon of interpreting left her feeling like a liar, and the discomfort in that account is worth more to a working interpreter than a dozen sanitized case studies would be, precisely because it wasn't smoothed over before publication.

This is the particular value of blogs as a source for a book like this one: they are a nearly unfiltered record of people actually practicing the craft, written close enough to the experience that the frustration, the improvisation, and the small victories haven't yet been edited into tidy conclusions. A conference paper tells you what a method is supposed to accomplish. A blog post tells you what happened the Tuesday it didn't. Both are worth reading, but only one of them will warn you, in advance, about the exact moment a scripted line falls apart in front of a real visitor — which is exactly what happened to the Modern Reenactor blog's author, and exactly why that account earned its place here alongside the field's more formal literature.

That candor comes with a limitation worth naming honestly: a blog is one person's account of one set of experiences, not a vetted consensus, and it can be wrong, dated, or specific to a site and audience very different from yours. I treat blog sources the way I hope you'll treat a single guest's strong reaction in the moment — as real, useful evidence about how the work actually lands, weighed alongside everything else you know, rather than as the final word on its own.

A Note on Scope: Why Eighteenth-Century America

Everything in the preceding sections — the three interpretive modes, the case for and against first person, Tilden's principles — holds regardless of what century or continent you're portraying. A first-person interpreter working a medieval fair in England, a Victorian mill in New England, or a 1940s home-front exhibit faces the same structural bargain: no hindsight, no narrator's escape hatch, the same trust to uphold and the same ways to abuse it.

That said, my own grounding is in eighteenth-century American history interpretation, and I don't pretend otherwise. The persona-building methods in Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up, the primary-source guidance in Chapter 4. Finding Your Character's Voice, the material culture covered in Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture, and — most consequentially — the treatment of station, race, and bondage in Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage are all written from and for that specific period and place, drawing on sites like Colonial Williamsburg and Plimoth Patuxet rather than on the wider world of living history generally.

If your persona lives in a different century or a different country, the underlying craft here should still transfer — but the specific research strategies, the specific archives, and above all the specific historical content of what your character would say, believe, and be able to answer are yours to work out on your own ground. Treat this as a map of the terrain drawn by someone who has walked eighteenth-century America extensively and everywhere else only in passing.

My Guiding Principle

Every technique in the chapters that follow serves one test: does this choice help the guest in front of you understand the past, or does it just prove how well you can perform it? First person is a means, not an end. A perfectly maintained accent that leaves a visitor confused and disengaged has failed, no matter how accurate it was. A moment of frame-breaking honesty that helps a frightened child, answers a genuine question, or de-escalates a tense exchange has succeeded, even though it technically broke character.

Term: Interpretation — In the museum-studies sense I use throughout, interpretation means translating the raw facts of the past (an object, a building, a document, a practice) into meaning a present-day visitor can connect with — not simply reciting information. The term and its foundational principles trace to Freeman Tilden's 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage, still the field's most cited touchstone: interpretation should relate to something within the visitor's own experience, reveal rather than merely instruct, and aim at provocation — inspiring visitors to look further on their own — rather than at exhaustive information.12

Tilden's six principles, more fully stated, are that interpretation should relate to something within the visitor's own life and experience; that information alone is not interpretation, though all interpretation contains information; that interpretation is an art, combinable from many disciplines regardless of whether the material presented is scientific, historical, or architectural; that its chief aim is provocation, not instruction — inspiring visitors toward their own further curiosity rather than delivering a finished conclusion; that good interpretation addresses the whole person rather than any single phase or fragment; and that interpretation aimed at children requires a fundamentally different, not merely simplified, approach than interpretation for adults. Tilden wrote about interpretation broadly, not first person specifically, but his principles map onto this material almost exactly, and the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) — the field's principal North American professional body — builds much of its own training and certification curriculum directly on this framework.13 A first-person interpreter who buries a guest in accurate period facts, delivered in a flawless voice, has honored the costume of the discipline while missing its actual purpose, exactly the failure Tilden's second principle warns against.

A concrete example of the same test cutting the other way: Colonial Williamsburg deliberately keeps its trades program — its blacksmiths, coopers, and other craftspeople — in third person rather than first. A third-person tradesperson can explain that eighteenth-century soap-making worked perfectly well even though nobody involved had any concept of germ theory, drawing a direct line between a period process and a guest's own modern knowledge. A first-person tradesperson could not make that comparison without stepping out of character, because the comparison itself depends on knowledge the persona doesn't have. As Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, puts it, first person's usual strength — no hindsight, no narrator's escape hatch — is exactly the wrong tool when the actual teaching goal requires a hindsight-dependent comparison.14

The chapters ahead will keep returning to this test: research and voice (Chapters 2–7) exist to make your portrayal credible enough that guests trust it; craft around difficult material and real guest encounters (Chapters 8–12) exists to make sure that trust is never abused; and practice (Chapter 13) exists to make all of it durable enough to survive a real day with real, unpredictable people.

What's Ahead

Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up — research methods, primary sources, and the biography behind your character.

Chapter 3. Finding and Evaluating Your Sources — primary versus secondary sources, judging credibility, and where to find both without a research budget.

Chapter 4. Finding Your Character's Voice — how period language and register (covered fully in the companion volume) map onto a specific persona.

Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person — dressing and furnishing a persona so the visible world matches the voice.

Chapter 6. The Language of the Eighteenth-Century Economy — where a persona's possessions actually came from, and how she paid for them without much cash ever changing hands.

Chapter 7. Daily Rhythms and Domestic Tradecraft — the seasonal and daily work that gives a character something to actually be doing.

Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage — the field's hardest and most necessary chapter.

Chapter 9. The Art of Hospitality: Invitation, Etiquette, and the Language of Welcome — the language of invitation, greeting, and welcome that governed every social encounter.

Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest and Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly — staying in character under real conditions, and knowing exactly when not to.

Chapter 12. Working a Crowd: Groups, Children, and Hard Questions — groups, children, and the questions that catch every interpreter off guard eventually.

Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression — practical exercises.

Chapter 14. Finding Your Community and Going Further — where this field's ongoing conversation happens, and what to read next.

Chapter 15. The Business of Living History: Gigs, Marketing, and Getting Paid — turning the work into paid work: venues, marketing, pricing, and the tradeoffs between staying informal, forming an LLC, or founding a nonprofit.

Chapter 16. Quick-Reference Appendix — templates and checklists to keep at your elbow.

Read the chapters in order the first time through. After that, use it the way you'd use any field manual: open to the chapter that matches today's problem.

About Me

I came to this craft late and by a side door. While raising my young family and pursuing my career as a professor, I began my own first-person interpretation journey in 2011, developing a bakehouse exhibit for a small local festival and, the following year, overseeing construction of the English Common Press15 I still use today in my own portrayal of the Boston patriot printer Isaiah Thomas.

That festival grew. By the time of our nation's semiquincentennial anniversary celebration, the Colonial Heritage Festival involved nearly 500 volunteers, most of whom are history interpreters, many presenting in the first person.16 At the time of this writing, I serve as coordinator of this festival, which I believe to be largest living-history celebration of the American founding outside the original 13 colonies, attracting between 20,000 and 35,000 visitors over its three-day schedule. Running an event this size means recruiting and preparing volunteer interpreters every year — many of them stepping into a first-person role for the first time in their lives — and I found I had no good institutional resource to hand them. The training material I could find was either scattered across individual sites' internal handbooks, not built for someone starting from zero, or simply didn't exist in a form volunteers could work through on their own schedules.

So I built one. I organized a ten-week workshop, Interpreting the American Founding, bringing in guest lecturers who were themselves professional history interpreters from organizations across the field — living-history performers portraying figures from George and Martha Washington to Thomas Jefferson, alongside working historians from institutions like Colonial Williamsburg.17 Watching that workshop come together, session by session, week after week, convinced me that the underlying material deserved a more durable and more widely available form than a one-time workshop could offer. This book is the result: the resource I wish had existed when I was starting out, written for the interpreter who is where I was in 2011.