WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Those visiting Colonial Williamsburg on a nostalgia trip will be pleased.
Fife and drum bands still parade down Gloucester’s Duke Street, whose shops are filled with costumed performers making 18th-century wigs or reenacting the political debates that helped birth the American Revolution.
But if you go to the pillory to recreate a photo from long ago, you’ll find the jaws bolted shut.
They were closed in 2020 due to Covid. And they have remained closed while Colonial Williamsburg — the world’s largest “living history” museum — reconsiders its message.
“These are friendly pillory,” said Matt Webster, museum director. And they are not faithful. The pillorys of the 18th century would have been higher and more uncomfortable. “His intention was to humiliate,” he said.
The modified pillorys are an apt metaphor for today’s Colonial Williamsburg, a 300-acre complex consisting of more than 600 restored 18th-century buildings, 30 gardens, 5 hotels, 3 theaters, 2 art museums, and a long, tangled history. of grappling with questions of authenticity, national identity, and what it means to “correctly” represent the past.
After decades of declining attendance and financial instability, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the private entity that operates the site, is reconsidering the stories it tells, adding or expanding offerings related to Black, Native American and LGBTQ history .
Cliff Fleet, a former tobacco executive who is the foundation’s president, describes his approach as presenting the “factual story,” grounded in rigorous research. “Everything is going to be what really happened,” he said.
In 2021, the foundation raised $102 million, up 42 percent from 2019. It has raised more than $6 million to rebuild the First Baptist Church, home to one of the first black congregations in the United States ( founded in 1776), and more than $8 million for the restoration of the Bray School, which educated free and enslaved black children in the 1760s and 1770s.
“It’s a remarkable change,” said Karin Wulf, a historian with ties to the nearby College of William & Mary.
“Decades of study have shown us this fuller, richer picture of America’s early years,” Wulf said. “It is diverse, it is complex, it is violent. But it is the authentic thing.”
In the 1920s, a local minister convinced magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. to purchase most of the historic area, with the goal of recreating Virginia’s 18th-century colonial capital.
More than 80 surviving 18th-century buildings were restored, while the foundations of more than 500 more were excavated so that exact replicas of structures could be built on them.
After World War II, Colonial Williamsburg became a patriotic shrine and “a symbol of democracy in a troubled world,” as one top executive put it at the time.
But in recent years, the carefully handled story has drawn criticism, while social history has exploded, with its emphasis on ordinary people and marginalized groups.
In the 1770s, more than half of the City’s 1,800 residents were black, although visitors wouldn’t always know it.
In 1979, the foundation added costumed “first-person” performers representing everyday people, white and black. In 1984, he created a unit dedicated to African American history.
The current leadership has strong support from the council, said former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who became council president in December 2020.
Now, he said, “you’re going to hear more of the story. And you’re going to hear more of the story because it’s true.”
By: Jennifer Schuessler
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6769403, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-20 21:00:07
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