Archive

Archives and reenactment typically have been variously deployed by different historical practitioners. Professional historians have, relied almost entirely on the written archive as a source from which to conduct analysis and then draw their accounts of the past. The contemporary perspective that archives are more than simply stores of knowledge owes a great deal to the work of Michel Foucault. An interest in the processes of creating archives has led scholars to be more reflexive about the experience of using archives. Scholars have moved beyond imagining the work of creating and keeping records and begun to physically reenact those processes. In a straightforward definition of the archive, these investigations address very mundane techniques of record-keeping and commonplace skills such as typing, indexing, and filing. Archives are increasingly accessible to a wider range of historical practitioners, including reenactment societies and researchers for film and television, potentially altering expectations about accuracy and authenticity in reenactments.