menuFinding Your Community and Going Further

Chapter 14: Finding Your Community and Going Further

Learning Objectives

  1. Identify where the living-history community discusses interpretation technique on an ongoing basis.
  2. Locate training, certification, and conference opportunities for professional development beyond this book.
  3. Locate further reading that goes deeper than this book on specific topics it introduced.
  4. Evaluate community sources — blogs, forums, and social media groups — with the same critical eye applied to any historical source.

This book is an introduction, not the last word. First-person interpretation is a living practice, refined constantly by people doing the actual work at actual sites, and most of what's genuinely useful to know next lives in that ongoing conversation rather than in any single book — including this one. This chapter is a map to where that conversation happens.

14.1 Blogs and Sites Referenced Throughout This Book

Several sources cited in earlier chapters are worth following directly rather than only through this book's summary of them:

Treat blogs and community writing the way this book has treated every other source: useful, often excellent, but written by individuals with their own site's context, their own period focus, and their own opinions. A technique that works beautifully at one site's format may need real adaptation for yours. Cross-check anything load-bearing against the more rigorously sourced references below.

14.2 Finding Other Interpreters

Living history is easier to learn inside a community than alone. Two kinds of resources are worth seeking out:

When you join a new community, spend real time reading before posting. Every one of these spaces has its own accumulated norms about sourcing standards, tone, and how much disagreement is welcome — norms that take a while to absorb and are easy to violate by accident.

14.3 Breaking In: From Hobby to Vocation

For anyone hoping to turn this from a hobby into paid work — a real vocation, however small a share of the professional living-history world actually operates that way — Nat Lasley's own path is a useful, concrete model. He started with odd jobs, one of which happened to be at a small local historic house looking to start a modest historical theater program; he volunteered there, built a tight, primary-source-grounded persona and a prepared short presentation, and asked to come back. Each successive site became a credential toward the next, larger one, eventually leading to Colonial Williamsburg. His practical advice for anyone starting the same way: find small, under-resourced sites that genuinely need volunteers rather than aiming straight for a flagship institution, offer a short, well-prepared piece rather than an open-ended commitment, and let a track record of reliable, well-researched work accumulate site by site rather than trying to skip straight to the top.1

14.4 Training, Certification, and Conferences

Beyond informal community and reading, a handful of structured professional-development paths are worth knowing about specifically:

If you're building a training pipeline for new interpreters at your own site rather than seeking one out elsewhere, it helps to have a concrete model in mind rather than inventing one from scratch. One established program's approach — as Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, describes hers — offered here as one illustrative shape rather than a required template: every new hire, regardless of eventual role, starts with the same general orientation to the site's history and period before ever being assigned to a specific interpretive unit; from there, a new interpreter shadows an experienced one, then moves to scripted "fourth-wall" scenes — microphone on for the scene itself, off once it ends — before finally working unscripted, first paired with a partner and only later alone. In this program, that progression typically runs six to nine months before an interpreter is trusted to work completely solo, and closer to a year before they've rotated through enough pairings and persona types to have the full range this book has been building toward. Adapt the shape, not the exact timeline, to whatever scale your own site can actually support.3

Professional development is also worth pursuing outside living history entirely. Visiting other museums broadly — not just other living-history sites, but art museums in particular — repays deliberate effort, because every different interpretive medium is a transferable tool even when the subject matter has nothing to do with your own period. How does a gallery docent make a guest feel something specific from a painting on a wall, with no task, no costume, and no first-person voice to lean on at all? That's a real interpretive technique, developed under real constraints, and it's easy to settle for the first approach you happen to see work at your own site, as Pittman puts it, rather than actively seeking out how a completely different kind of institution solves the same underlying problem.4

14.5 Foundational Reading Beyond This Book

A fuller list of works that go deeper than this book could, organized by the chapter they connect to most closely:

On the theory and history of interpretation and living history (see Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard):

On research method and material culture (see Chapter 2. Building a Persona from the Ground Up and Chapter 5. Material Culture: Dressing and Furnishing the Person: Material Culture):

On voice and language (see Chapter 4. Finding Your Character's Voice):

On station, race, and bondage (see Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage):

On improvisation, museum theater, and the emotional demands of the work (see Chapter 10. In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest: In the Field, Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly, and Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression):

Magelssen writes from performance studies rather than history or museum education specifically, so his framing will feel different — more theoretical, more concerned with what a performance of "the past" actually claims to do — than the practitioner-oriented sources elsewhere in this list. Read him after, not instead of, the more hands-on references above.

With this map in hand, close out with the Chapter 16. Quick-Reference Appendix — a condensed set of templates and checklists distilled from every chapter, meant to live in your bag or your notebook, not on a shelf.

  1. Nat Lasley, who has portrayed Patrick Henry at Colonial Williamsburg since 2025, discussed this as part of the same workshop mentioned in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard; see Interpreting History for session details.↩︎

  2. NAI's certification tracks were developed for a broad range of interpretive settings — parks, nature centers, and cultural sites alike — not exclusively living history, so expect to translate some of its general framework to the first-person-specific concerns this book covers.↩︎

  3. Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, discussed this as part of the same workshop mentioned in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard; see Interpreting History for session details.↩︎

  4. Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, discussed this as part of the same workshop mentioned in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard; see Interpreting History for session details.↩︎