If you can historically re-enact the 1890s, can you do the 1990s? Where does it end?
The assault on the Capitol
Isn’t the When We Were Young festival just 90s reenactment?
Define “legitimate”.
If you want to go for comedic reenactment, Saturday Night Live does it for events within a week.
I can re-enact a person sleeping
What is 2000s club night if not an immersive historical re-enactment?
Cooking without any mechanical or electrical tools (including stove)
The hard line is the 1st of Januray 1970
I feel like I’ve been historically recreating the previous day for the past few years.
I reenact all of the stupid things I said during the day at 3am. Does that count?
There is no hard line, just what you yourself would feel silly reenacting.
So just brush the dust off that office beige PC and CRT monitor and have a lan party with your friends.
I feel like it would be kind of silly to reenact, like, the 1980s. Or, even though it was hugely historical, the Vietnam War. It was terrible and people who had to deal with it are still alive; what would be the point of trying to show people what it was like? Do people really have trouble imagining what life was like in the 1980s? Wasn’t it basically like now, unlike, say, the 1890s?
Do people really have trouble imagining what life was like in the 1980s? Wasn’t it basically like now?
Society was very different in many ways:
- Personal computers were only just starting to become common. The Apple Macintosh launched in 1984, the IBM PC a few years before. There was no Microsoft Windows, no Linux. If you didn’t type your paperwork yourself, most large workplaces had a typing pool to do it for you
- There was no Internet. If you wanted to send a message to someone, you could write a letter and post it, or phone them, or send a telegram
- mobile phones were uncommon, and usually only in cars
- the Sony Walkman had only just come out in 1979, and you listened to your music on cassettes
- cancer, AIDS, heart conditions were almost always untreatable and terminal within years, if not months
- US involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan hadn’t happened yet. Britain had a war with Argentina in the Falkland Islands. Ireland was still fighting with Britain
- LA Law and Miami Vice were considered cool
Wasn’t it basically like now, unlike, say, the 1890s?
TV Movies of the week reenact things have happpened months ago…
For this example, I would loosely define an event or item as historical if it was characteristic to a recognizable time period that people can instantly associate it with, or if it evokes feelings of nostalgia.
This. Anything that’s recognisably from a previous era, even if it’s just a hairstyle or a fashion trend, can be a re-enactment of that era if someone knowingly and willingly chooses to style themselves that way.
If we’re talking re-enacting the way the folks who wear historish costumes and blank-fire muskets at each other mean it, then the cutoff is “whatever the last war was fought locally and then ended.”
If you mean it the way the folks who wear even sillier costumes, drink, and walk around with swords mean it, then the cutoff is “whenever the clothes we want to wear were last plausibly worn.”
If you mean it the way a TV reporter, producer, or academic might mean it, however, there’s no cutoff beyond “isn’t happening now.”. (There’s a famous story about someone who won the lottery after playing on a whim, was egged on by a reporter to re-enact buying the ticket, and won again.)
