Museum Review: Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Romero
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Williamsburg

The Walter Scott Experience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Historical Reenactment ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Living History Museum ◽  
Historical Fictions

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.

Goodwin’s Ghosts

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Alena Pirok
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
For Profit ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Original Idea ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Business Entities

Recent news about Colonial Williamsburg outsourcing the management of its for-profit business entities has inspired questions about the museum’s original intent and how it should shape the institution’s future. This article offers a fresh look at the institution’s founding, and argues that the original idea for the museum was far spookier than researchers have acknowledged. In fact, elements of the uncanny, from ghost stories to talk of spirits and time travel, have been present in nearly all of the foundation’s innovative historical interpretation since the 1930s.

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