In Living Color: Early "Impressions" of Slavery and the Limits of Living History

In the 1970s, American historical sites began to more thoroughly and critically interpret slavery's history, with a few institutions employing living history as an interpretive form. At sites like Virginia's Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, the hope is that these historical "impressions" will engage audiences with a more authentic or credible representation of racial bondage. An earlier wave of living historical representations of slavery suggest the challenges and hazards of embodied history, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of southern sites employed African American interpreters who claimed to have been born into slavery, often on the very sites where they were currently working. Historical attractions used the "authenticity" and "credibility" of these interpreters to advance the narrative of a happy Old South. Historians have noted these performances as part of the sectional reconciliation of the Jim Crow era, but have rarely interpreted them as public history. Although the contemporary living history of slavery has different - and far better - goals than impressions of a century past, this long history of embodied bondage suggests the implicit dangers of interpreting slavery and race through living people.