The Wordsmith's Forge

Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons

Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living museum that is taking a radical approach to our national divides.

Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg: the world’s largest living history museum. The town, located in the tidewater region of Virginia, served as the colony (and later state) capital from 1699 to 1780, when Gov. Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the town’s vulnerability to the British navy as the Revolutionary War raged, moved the seat of government to Richmond.


I'm a fan of living history and historical recreation. These can be done in many ways, each with its own appeal and advantages. Anything that gets people to engage with and think about history is a good thing. Plus it helps keep traditional crafts alive, and you never know when we might need those.


We are walking towards the reconstructed Capitol building at the end of Duke of Gloucester Street, where America’s framers delivered soaring speeches about the social contract, natural rights and freedom. Franks, the reluctant colonist, is not impressed. “They call themselves planters. How much planting do they do?” he asks contemptuously. “Other people are doing the work for them. They have the time to leave their farms and come here.”

Nailed it. There was a lot of fantasizing in early America, and that's a problem.


As the culture wars rages, the MAGA right and progressive left battle over the core identity of our shared country. What are America’s foundational values, and are those values worth preserving?

Well, do you mean the ones they talked or the ones they walked? Because those can be pretty far apart, and while some of the high ideals would be good if people actually followed them, what people do is often reprehensible and some of that nonsense has gotten enshrined in law. And whose values? Because America has always been a mix of cultures, who don't all have the same values of either kind.


Were America’s framers biblically inspired visionaries, enlightened freedom fighters or colonizing enslavers desperate to avoid a small tax on imported goods?

Some of each. People are diverse. Harriet Tubman was an englightened freedom fighter, but in her lifetime, she was considered a criminal. Andrew Jackson was a genocidal maniac. And so on.


How does America teach its history?

Badly. But also diversely. It's like the blind men and the elephant, but that's okay as long as you know the story. Because if you pick up all the history resources that you can get your hot little hands on, and consume them thoughtfully, then you can splice together a pretty good idea of what an elephant is.

This has gotten me kicked out of a lot of history classes, but I've learned much more about history that way. It's how I can write alternate history, or figure out the history of cultures in other dimensions.


Colonial Williamsburg is, or strives to be, a safe space: not the kind that shields you from hard questions, but the kind that lets you ask them. If visitors choose to face the unvarnished truths on display here, there are guides to help them through that process without judgment or recrimination. In our era of bad feelings, where history often functions more like a weapon than the story of our past, we are at each other’s throats over what should and should not be allowed into the discussion at all, never mind what happened or what any of it means.

That's a vital service, not just for teaching history, but for showing people that reasoned discourse of hot topics is possible.


And yet somehow — in this anachronistic piece of tidewater Virginia best known for petticoats and carriage rides — a museum that started as a sanitized playground for nostalgia-seekers evolved into a place of reckoning able to meet most people where they are, be they a lefty professor, a red-hat Republican or a sixth grader on a field trip.

The thing about museums is that, despite being giant time capsules, they are also made of people as much as objects, so they grow and change over time. Each is a reflection of its culture in the moment, a piece of the story that people are telling about themselves. So as the people change, their museums change.

This is why I'm against destroying art, even racist or otherwise troublesome art. When the culture decides it doesn't want to display those things in public anymore because they have become embarrassing, then they belong in a museum where people can choose to view and study them, without bothering nonconsenting bystanders. You can learn a lot from a culture about the dumb mistakes it has made -- but only if someone preserves them. Sure it's gratifying to smash things. But it's bad archival practice and takes away evidence that someone might need later.


We all like to imagine ourselves as the good guys in history. It is fun to fantasize about holding the line at Harper’s Ferry or refusing to ratify our compromised Constitution. It’s also very easy.

It's just as easy to match that to today. If you're thinking about escaped slaves, how are your treating today's human trafficking victims? If you're thinking about Jews fleeing Germany, then how are you treating today's refugees from Syria or Ukraine or wherever? And so on. History repeats itself, because most people don't listen. So that means most historic mayhem has some modern equivalent(s). Any activist can use this pattern to select their worthy cause(s).

Some people are very persistent about carrying their past into the present and looking on others with compassion. So for instance, when the Choctaw (themselves barely surviving at the time) heard about the Irish Potato Famine, they scraped up every penny they could to send as international aid. When I'm writing the Rutledge thread, I think about things like this. The handful of Jewish folks in the area reach out to the Syrian refugees, because they know what it's like to be attacked and driven out to wander. The handful of black folks donate resources, because their ancestors arrived in America with nothing.

History repeats itself, but it's up to each of us how we choose to respond to that in the present moment. We can't fix history, but we can damn well try to fix the future.


“The thing that you’ve definitely seen in my pocket is absolutely a phone,” Munden says as he takes it out. “We’re in a society that is becoming increasingly dependent on you having them. … Who made it? Children. Children in factories that are barely given the rights that we would expect average workers to be given.” Child labor is not the same thing as chattel slavery, he says, but it is a form of exploitation, and something most of us condemn.

See above re: human trafficking. Slavery has many forms, and people nowadays don't talk about it the same way, but it still exists and is fairly widespread. So what are you doing about that? Do you think of prostitutes as criminals, or survivors of child abuse and rape? Do you feel that migrant workers should have human rights and be entitled to bathroom breaks, food, cold water, shade, and other things they need in order to survive -- or is it okay to murder them in the name of corporate profits? Are you doing what you can, within your budget and range of goods for sale, to support small local businesses and deny your folding vote to abusive megacorps? Or maybe you've chosen different worthy causes, which is okay, because nobody can do everything and no one activist can wave every banner. Choose mindfully. But include that when you are thinking about how you'd respond in the past.

And me? Hell, I've taught black and brown people to read in this lifetime. I still count that as among the most subversive things I've done. Nothing scares the shit out of white people like a black man with a book in his hands.


“We could spend our time, right this moment, trying to be activists,” Munden points out, still holding his own phone, implicating himself as he speaks. “Not a lot of people are doing that. They’d rather just continue to have the thing in your pocket, live more conveniently and allow these conditions to continue.”

Anyone can be an activist. It is your free choice to fight injustice wherever it bothers you more than you find tolerable. But don't talk the talk if you're not walking the walk.


Colonial problems feel a lot less abstract than they did a few minutes ago. “History is as complicated as people are,” Munden says. “We don’t have to come from a place of ‘people are right or wrong,’ but rather from a place of what we learn from them about how we can behave differently.”

Very astute.

Huh, it'd be fun to do the newspaper exercise in that environment. Go down your favorite list of ethical systems and use them to derive answers about the right and wrong of history, where you could actually talk it out with trained historians.


>> As I interacted with the administration and staff at Colonial Williamsburg during my week-long stay, I received several gentle but firm linguistic corrections. There are no tourists here: There are visitors and guests. The people that front-line staff portray are not characters, but historical persons. And the costumed employees that populate the reconstructed town are not reenactors, but interpreters.

This is where the range comes in. Tourists can be visitors, or even researchers and historians. Living history is a type of historical reenactment. Interpreters are reenactor and also historians. But the words we choose evoke a particular way of doing a thing within that range of possibilities.


“I love when people come and suddenly they realize they’re not just talking to a historian, or an actor who has a script, but when they realize that you can ask Thomas Jefferson anything,” said Kurt Smith, who has interpreted the author of the Declaration of Independence for nine years. When I encountered him as Jefferson on the palace green, he answered a wide range of guest questions that spanned architecture, religious freedom and his personal feelings on Alexander Hamilton. “Most of the time I just enjoy allowing the audience to take me wherever they’re interested. They get to choose their own adventure. How cool is that?”

That really is awesome.


The real Jefferson wrote over 50,000 letters in his lifetime, and Smith has read them all. “When I first came on here, I was given six months of study where I didn’t take on the clothes,” he told me. “My job is to present Jefferson as honestly and as truthfully as we have,” he said, “I think a lot of people wrestle with him because he’s human. My job is to just get him right.”

Hence why I said historian. You can't do historical reenactment without learning a lot about history, and even just walking through a living history site or event will teach you a good deal about that time period. If you're a writer, that is super useful.


>> When Colonial Williamsburg opened to the public in 1932, its founders primarily intended the project as a preservation of art and culture. World-War-II-era patriotism and Cold-War kulturkampf prompted the institution’s transformation into a living embodiment of America’s origin story. Today, the 301-acre museum features 89 original buildings and hundreds of careful reconstructions. For $50 per day, or $75 per year, however, you can go inside the buildings, where interpreters and tradespeople are ready to answer questions about everything from parliamentary procedure to the town printing press.<<

That high ticket price explains why the visitors are mostly mature white people: that's who has the money in America. So here's a radical idea: subsidize free tickets for the many groups who currently can't get in. Not only would that help the institution survive, improve audience diversity, and educate more people -- it would also provide a concrete way for modern people to express their disapproval of their ancestors' poor life choices, or even to celebrate that they survived a shitty background by helping others who are still struggling. It's another way of living history.

Any institution with a diversity issue could do that. You know the donation box every museum has up front? List the current holdings and future goals, then let people donate where they want more representation. "Our current collection is 90% white and 80% male. Your donations can help us collect more artwork by people of color and other genders." Or even, "Our park system has 3 statues of slave owners. We are going to auction them off to museums that have antebellum collections, and use the money to commission statues of African-American heroes."


>> The staff members in this classroom overwhelmingly work in what the museum calls historic trades: fully functional workshops that specialize in 18th-century vocations like engraving, bookbinding and carpentry. One of the students expresses skepticism that guests always want to critically examine the past. What if they just want to see how shoes are made? Sure, Treese says, but like any salesman, you need to upsell. Don’t be pushy but offer the bigger option. <<

Honestly, if they're fascinated by historic shoemaking, they're going to get more history along with it, because everything is connected. The leather came from somewhere, it was processed in particular ways, someone had to make the tools, and so on. When you study a historic craft as a fan or a practitioner, you learn a ton about it. And let's not forget that these crafts are a type of history. It's not all just wars and famous people. History is how people lived and the timeline of inventions. Those can change everything else too, like the history of printing and publication. So don't knock it if someone just wants to talk about shoes. You should hear the seatweavers here going on and on about their gig. If you do a traditional craft, then history is living through you.


>>I’d already experienced this upsell the day before, when I ducked into the weaver’s shop to get out of the rain and found myself in a conversation with a tradesman about the economic impossibility of a full embargo on English cloth during the revolution while he deftly spun wool into yarn. The colonists had neither the sheep nor the wool for self-sufficiency; the wealthy politicians who bought outfits of American cloth were engaged in an 18th century form of virtue signaling. The conversation flowed easily, more like gossip than a lecture. I felt as though I’d been tricked into learning something.<<

ROFL that can happen.


There was another, pyramid-shaped factor at play in the weaver’s shop: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. With the theory displayed on the projector behind them, Treese and Ryalls explained to the interpreters that they must satisfy basic guest requirements before they can move on to higher-level ones. Only once guests have their basic physiological and safety needs met (escaping cold rain) can they take advantage of the museum to meet their higher-level needs (economic realpolitik).

This is extremely astute, and sadly rare in America today. Compare this with experiential levels of commitment.


Interpreters can meet the next level of need, social safety, by making guests feel like they belong at the museum. A guest who feels unwelcome or out of place will be too busy protecting their ego to learn anything. Creating these feelings of belonging, Treese says, means “accepting your audience where they are, who they are, what their world and life experience is.”

Very well reasoned. A good museum will be able to engage with a wide range of visitors, from children who are just starting to explore what history even is through teens who want to question ever authority figure ever to average adults on vacation to the history professor who wants to geek out with fellow history buffs. Not necessarily all needs will be met by every employee, but the total site should cover that range.


This concept sounds a lot like something culture warriors would call a “safe space,” often portrayed as an infantilizing bubble that protects the people inside from facts they might find triggering or upsetting. Colonial Williamsburg’s model rejects the dichotomy. First you establish the safe space, then you teach the facts. Only when people feel secure will they feel ready to grapple with realities that might upset them.

People who criticize safe spaces and trigger warnings tend to be people who don't feel like they need those things. People who actually use them are much more aware of them as tools that enable folks to deal with bigger challenges than they could without those. It's like how a basket lets you carry more weight or a crowbar can open a stuck door. While I don't approve of requiring these things -- because it takes extra resources and not everyone is good at it -- they are excellent tools to have available. Also, because hammering at a captive audience will not make them agree with you, it will make them silently resolve to attack your efforts once they have a better vantage point.


James Armistead Lafayette’s story encapsulates the paradox at the heart of America’s founding; enslavers who founded a nation to preserve liberty from tyrants. “To get a guest to understand that — to many of them it completely destroys their self-worth,” Seals said. “My job is to minimize their feelings of that destruction.”

This brings up some huge problems in America's race relations.

People often believe that race is a thing, when it's not; it's a delusion that some people have with no bearing in scientific fact. There are many differences among human populations, but they do not map consistently to what people think of as "race." So you have to understand that people deeply invested in the "isness" of race are not firmly grasping concrete reality but are viewing everything through the lens of that delusion. And when people behave as if delusions are real, that causes a lot of problems.

Another issue is over-identification. Everyone has lots of ancestors, and because people are diverse, that means everyone has the whole range of good and bad ancestors. In fact if you go back to Mitochondrial Eve, all surviving humans are related to each other -- who was presumably a black woman, as she lived in ancient Africa. Just because someone was an ancestor of yours, or bore a superficial resemblance to the body you are wearing, doesn't mean to you have to approve of their actions, agree with their politics, share their religion, or anything else. You are free to decide all those things for yourself. Maybe you do agree, but maybe you think they were really stupid.

This is critical for the evolution of human societies -- the ability to say, "Wow, that was really stupid, let's not do that again." You don't have to identify with people in the past. If you don't, then your identity will not be threatened by criticizing those people. Maybe you identify more with some other group who more closely align with your personal ideals, even though they look different. This is how the hippie activists wound up connecting with the American Indian Movement activists: they shared a lot of common ideals and goals. Being black doesn't make you dumb, being white doesn't make you a racist; it's your choice of beliefs and actions that define your identity and politics.

What we need a lot more of in history and race relations is reminding people of this, that their identity is not assigned but is something they create, and they don't have to feel personally ashamed or guilty or attacked over stuff that people did several centuries ago. What people are doing today matters much more. This is rooted in those old events, but is not determined by them. We're all free to say, "Race is bullshit" and work on dismantling the delusion. If we choose to do so.

These are also things that got me kicked out of history classes, but by that time, I was in company of black students pointing out that white presidents owned their ancestors. \o/


That job can require a deft hand and emotional control, as when an older Southern man visiting Colonial Williamsburg with his granddaughter complained about what he saw as the museum’s hyperfocus on American chattel slavery when slavery has existed for millennia. “He’s like, ‘I’m kind of an expert in that sort of thing,’” Seals recalls. “My mind went, ding ding ding! Because that’s also something that I’ve read a lot about as well, which means I can have a conversation.” Seals asked the guest about the realities of enslavement in Greece and Rome, and how those institutions differed from slavery in Colonial America. The differences quickly became apparent. Classical slavery was not hereditary or explicitly based on theories of superior and inferior races, and enslaved people in Greece and Rome had many avenues to attain freedom and become full citizens.

Exactly. You have to look for common ground where you can start a conversation. This is very hard work.


“He actually said to me, ‘I never thought of it that way,’” Seals said. “I didn’t have to embarrass him in front of his granddaughter, which would have completely shut him down.”

Impressive.


As with many historic sites, Colonial Williamsburg’s visitors skew older and paler. As of 2013 (the latest available statistics), only 3 percent of visitors were Black.

See above re: ticket cost and how we could very easily solve that problem, if we felt like doing so. Another idea: put up a bulletin board where people could buy an extra ticket to tack up, with a note if you like. "My idiot ancestor thought it was okay to own humans. Here is my concrete disagreement, in the form of a free ticket for any descendant of enslaved humans." And what if everyone did that? We could clean up the large mess remaining because of slavery, quite efficiently, just with concrete disagreements to close the gaps it created.


Portraying an enslaved person as someone whose ancestors were themselves enslaved in order to cater to a largely white audience can be emotionally shredding. In the beginning, Seals told me, the weight of it felt too much to bear. If not for Hope Wright, a fellow Black interpreter, he might have walked. “She saw me unbelievably depressed at the end of it, not wanting to deal with it anymore, and she said to me: ‘Do not bow your head. … It is an honor to give a voice to the voiceless, to humanize the dehumanized. You need to feel honored every single day that you are giving the ancestors a voice that they didn’t have when they were alive.’”

Sometimes the most important thing you can do is just bear witness and tell the story. But do pay attention to your own emotional health and safety. I would recommend that black employees finish the day with some sort of black cultural activity where they don't have to cater to white people. Hell, get some white employees to serve them African feast foods or something.


But as Colonial Williamsburg’s ambitions grew, its available resources shrank. Ticket sales peaked at 1.2 million in the mid 1980s and has declined to just over 500,000 today. It became increasingly clear the organization would need to increase revenue, cut costs or perish.

This is why we need more support for museums, historical recreation, and other cultural fixtures. Ideally, these should be free for everyone to enjoy and educate themselves -- not just a tourist trap for well-to-do white folks.


He further angered purists with his dramatically different vision for Colonial Williamsburg: less Ken Burns, more Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton explicitly inspired many of the institute’s changes, including programming that featured gender-swapped House of Burgess members. Some “accurate-ish” ideas went too far even for the new administration — a proposal for revolutionary laser tag was considered but shot down. Others, like an “Escape the King” escape room (which required knowledge of revolutionary war trivia) and a Halloween zombie pirate adventure, went through.

It's not a bad idea to mix up options, because people learn in different ways. But don't lose sight of education in pursuit of entertainment. That's what Hollywood is for.


“They took this knowledge and were like, ‘OK, but once I can read a pamphlet, I can read anything,’” Hope Wright told me. “They all resisted in some way, shape or form.” One student, Isaac Bee, sought freedom at least twice using papers he forged. Gowan Pamphlet, founder of the First Baptist Church, likely learned to read as a child from children sent to the Bray School. This intellectual freedom proved intolerable for America’s enslavers: In 1831, teaching an enslaved person to read became illegal in Virginia.

Whenever I teach or encourage people of color to read, I do several things: emphasize its subversive nature, explain how they can use it to their advantage, and assign or recommend material written by people like them about topics that touch on their own lives. You want to be a troublemaker? Read books, it drives The Man absolutely apeshit.


Brown stresses several times that she does not want to put rose-colored glasses on the Bray School. I’m getting hints of rosiness anyway — the kind that might make audiences feel better about America’s legacy of slavery rather than bringing them face-to-face with the reality of the situation. Black children were forced to make the brickwork for this building, perhaps the same Black children who were indoctrinated inside of it. That many took that knowledge and used it to their advantage is a story of incredible courage and resilience, but that story cannot erase the dark reasons why they needed such resilience. And that story should make people a little bit uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable if you over-identify with people in the past. If you think "What a bunch of dumb fucks making a mess I have to clean up," then you probably feel angry instead. Or maybe you identify with enslaved workers, and you put your hand on that wall and say, "Thank you for surviving. We're still here because of you. We're telling your stories as best we can, and trying to fix what's broke."


Smith, the Thomas Jefferson interpreter, had a run-in about a year and a half ago that stuck with him. “I had a white supremacist at one of my audiences. He tried to take over the audience, just shouting.” Smith had a microphone and years of speaking appearance; he drowned the racist out and carried on. “Those sort of charges of energy that [are] in our current fabric of conversation in America, we meet them here.”

Sometimes, the charm lies in seeing a racist lose

If we’re going to have a future, we have to talk about our past.

This is a true fact.


“We are not a red or blue site. We’re not a purple site. We are just a primary source site, and we’re nondiscriminatory of who comes here. It’s not a self-selecting audience. We don’t have just one party coming here,” Smith said. “History is not there for us to like or dislike. History is there for us to learn from.”

Well said.