War Reenacting, Pt. 2

I want to thank everyone for the enlightening and illuminating emails we’ve gotten about war reenacting. And please keep them coming. I had asked whether war reenacting wasn’t limited, at least in the main, to the era of wars between the Civil War and World War II. But this is far from the case. We’ve gotten reports of everything from Vietnam War reenacting, to reenacted Roman Legions marching down the Appian Way to English Civil War reenacting down to Viking raid reenacting (curious about that last one — who plays the raided monks?). It still seems right that it’s bigger in the US than in Europe, but the disparity actually seems to be substantially less than I might have thought. And there may not be any difference at all. All told, there’s a ton of reenacting going on — and, as you’d expect, for reasons ranging from amateur history research to camaraderie and ideological nostalgia. We’ll have more on this later.