When I was fourteen, I realized I could pretend to be a Civil War soldier by reenacting the Civil War. Shortly afterwards, I realized that I could make the same things Civil War soldiers used. I grew up in a household where my parents made things and I was lucky enough to fall in with reenactors who made the clothing, accoutrements, and paperwork they used at events. I learned everything I could about being a Civil War soldier. In the years since, as a historian and archaeologist, I’ve held and read hundreds of original Civil War letters and diaries, examined photographs, and even excavated Civil War artifacts – unseen for 150 years – from archaeological sites. But I’ve never felt closer to the past than when I’m dressed in wool clothing, nursing a tin cup of coffee into existence over a few embers somewhere in Virginia, just before the sun rises and a bugle announces reveille.
I’m under no illusions that I’ve experienced the Civil War or any other historical period. So many elements of what I do keep me hopelessly in the present. As a tailor at Colonial Williamsburg one summer, I spent three months hand-sewing a linen tent in an eighteenth-century building. But when I sewed, my needles were cast steel and not drawn wire. My thread was mechanically spun. My clothing was only an approximation, in cut, construction, and material, to eighteenth-century clothes. My teeth were cleaner and my gut free from any number of parasites and diseases so prevalent in past ages. I went home at the end of an eight-hour workday. And my mind was a modern one.
But when you practice a historical skill, you still move in much the same way as someone three centuries ago. You learn how to relax your grip on the needle to prevent hand- and wrist-aches. You feel how your back muscles tire and your posture changes after a day sitting “tailor fashion” with crossed legs. And you start to notice things. Lint floating in the air. The miniscule sensation in your fingers communicated by a needle that has a small barb growing at its tip. How it’s possible to daydream and almost even fall asleep amid the rhythmic motions of sewing long seams. We will always need words to create history. But it’s in these moments of experiencing elements of what is was like in the past that you connect with people long gone. This makes you a better historian because you can describe the past better.