Edward Rothstein: Colonial Williamsburg upgraded
... Colonial Williamsburg, where all this took place (about 150 miles south of Washington), is variously called a historical village or a living museum. But that means much more now than it once did. Aside from dramatizing historical controversies, the town is also caught up in living ones: debates about who writes history and how it is told, about what historical realism is and how it should be portrayed, even about what aspects of our past are to be celebrated in this strange combination of education and entertainment.
Everything here, for example, is from late-18th-century Virginia, with crucial exceptions including: no slavery apart from the dramatizations (although until just a few decades ago here forms of discrimination and segregation were still commonplace), flush toilets and freshly painted buildings as carefully tended as suburban developments, which in some ways Colonial Williamsburg resembles.
One doesn’t really step into the past here, or in any of the other historical villages developed after Colonial Williamsburg’s pioneering success. Despite the obsession with authenticity — historical techniques and period tools reign, the blue-gray glaze on the bricks is reproduced using local clay and hardwood fires, 88 Colonial buildings have been restored and more than 400 created based on research by architects and archaeologists — nothing seems quite real. Reproductions and renovations and innovations intermingle, creating an image of the past so carefully constructed that it is a re-creation in all senses of the word.
But what an astonishing enterprise it is, and what a difficult task Colonial Williamsburg now faces. It was always meant to be an inspiration. In the early 20th century the Rev. William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin, rector of the local parish, imagined creating “a living shrine that will present a picture, right before our eyes, of the shining days” when the town was “a crucible of freedom.” He won the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who later said the historical village “teaches of the patriotism, high purpose and unselfish devotion of our forefathers to the common good.” At its opening in 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited and pronounced its central Duke of Gloucester Street “the most historic avenue in all America.” Since then almost every president has toured the premises; President Ronald Reagan even held an economic summit of industrialized nations here in 1983.
But that symbolic weight may now be a burden. This living museum’s very point — a celebration of the origins of the United States — is often greeted with skepticism. In their preoccupation with this country’s past flaws and failures, organizers of the nearby Jamestown’s 400th-anniversary events in May have shunned the term celebration in favor of commemoration....
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Everything here, for example, is from late-18th-century Virginia, with crucial exceptions including: no slavery apart from the dramatizations (although until just a few decades ago here forms of discrimination and segregation were still commonplace), flush toilets and freshly painted buildings as carefully tended as suburban developments, which in some ways Colonial Williamsburg resembles.
One doesn’t really step into the past here, or in any of the other historical villages developed after Colonial Williamsburg’s pioneering success. Despite the obsession with authenticity — historical techniques and period tools reign, the blue-gray glaze on the bricks is reproduced using local clay and hardwood fires, 88 Colonial buildings have been restored and more than 400 created based on research by architects and archaeologists — nothing seems quite real. Reproductions and renovations and innovations intermingle, creating an image of the past so carefully constructed that it is a re-creation in all senses of the word.
But what an astonishing enterprise it is, and what a difficult task Colonial Williamsburg now faces. It was always meant to be an inspiration. In the early 20th century the Rev. William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin, rector of the local parish, imagined creating “a living shrine that will present a picture, right before our eyes, of the shining days” when the town was “a crucible of freedom.” He won the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who later said the historical village “teaches of the patriotism, high purpose and unselfish devotion of our forefathers to the common good.” At its opening in 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited and pronounced its central Duke of Gloucester Street “the most historic avenue in all America.” Since then almost every president has toured the premises; President Ronald Reagan even held an economic summit of industrialized nations here in 1983.
But that symbolic weight may now be a burden. This living museum’s very point — a celebration of the origins of the United States — is often greeted with skepticism. In their preoccupation with this country’s past flaws and failures, organizers of the nearby Jamestown’s 400th-anniversary events in May have shunned the term celebration in favor of commemoration....