History Comes Alive by M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska

Author:M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Reenacting the 1776 Juan Bautista de Anza Expedition from Mexico City to San Francisco, 1976. From American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, The Bicentennial of the United States of America: A Final Report to the People.

Lewis and his companions wanted to use their project to prompt both a deeper understanding and a reevaluation of both past and present. As Lewis said to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “We’ll humanize history for those who see us.”29 In press interviews during the course of the voyage, the La Salle group accented material hardships experienced by the original expedition, hoping that their reenactment of conditions of scarcity could call attention to questions of material inequality and environmental destruction in the contemporary United States. In his original proposal to the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), Lewis had written:

Without this knowledge of our struggling forefathers, we cannot be expected to appreciate the progress which has been made or to understand the errors which have been committed in the development of the Mississippi Valley. People without a sense of history can hardly be blamed for remaining blasé or indifferent in the midst of abundance which, for them has always existed. It is therefore imperative that Americans be imbued with an historical awareness if indeed we are to continue our progress and preserve our environment.30

Lewis was addressing environmental imperatives circulating in the present but refracting them through history. For the group, reenactment was a way to contemplate both the progress and the errors of American history as well as to associate the journeys of La Salle and other explorers with contemporary discourses of ecological scarcity. Reenactive historical practices have been critiqued by scholars who worry that they sublimate any sense of historical context, but this is not always true.31 As Lewis’s writings on the La Salle project help demonstrate, reenactment can be more accurately said to allow the emergence of questions and interpretations that connect and compare the past to the present and to transfer historical understanding from the collective to the individual.

For Lewis, another goal of the reenactment was to give his students a new sense of themselves. Reflecting on the experience, he noted, “During the past few years, I’ve watched my students get more and more cynical about the possibility of individual accomplishment in this society. And I’ve watched my own generation get more and more contemptuous about youth’s ability to respond to challenge.”32 Lewis hoped that his students, in matching the achievements of their historical counterparts, would be moved to reconsider their own roles and actions in contemporary society. And indeed, during the journey and even years later, the students who were a part of the project reported that it had profoundly impacted their lives.33

In its attention to historical detail, the La Salle reenactment transported participants and even audiences at least partially into the past. After the reenactment ended, Lewis reported, “so many people told me they looked out on the river … and they thought they were back in the seventeenth century.”34 However, because

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