ABSTRACT
Questions of professional authority, credibility, and standards have long preoccupied historical studies. Beginning in the 1970s, public historians took traditional historians to task for what they saw as an elitist approach to historical inquiry. Public history, they argued, constituted a democratic desire to remove the hierarchy between the lay and traditional historian’s interpretation and use of the past (Ashton, 2010, pp. 3–5; Jensen, 1995, p. 13; Jensen, 2000, p. 223). As public historian Raphael Samuel argued, “If history was thought of as an activity rather than a profession, then the number of its practitioners would be legion” (2012 [1994], p. 17). Since at least the early 2000s, similar questions have occupied scholars of historical reenactment as well as reenactors themselves. In the absence of official credentialing bodies and tertiary degree programs, however, reenactment’s concern with authority, credibility, and standards has focused instead on the relative status and identity of experts versus amateurs. This has been examined primarily in analyses of American Civil War reenactment (Strauss, 2002; Farmer, 2005; Amster, 2008; Hart, 2007; Daugbjerg, 2014), but also in World War II (Thompson, 2010 [2004]) and medieval reenactments (Sandström, 2005; Esmark and Nielsen, 2015).
