ABSTRACT
Living history sites and practitioners face many fundamental challenges. For many sites, and perhaps for Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) itself, the ability to meet these challenges may well be a matter of survival. The colonial revival fad in the first several decades of the twentieth century focused on the quaintly decorated, if densely packed, room, of antique objects more than on the people who once used them. Fueled by patriotic pride, by the middle of the 1900s a modicum of life began to be injected into these "period rooms". By the 1980s and 1990s living history practitioners expanded on the idealism of the 1970s. They strove to improve the authenticity of their portrayals and "get it right". More use was made of reproduction tools, first-person techniques, and more historically accurate costumes and environments. At the 1998 annual ALHFAM conference a debate was conducted as to whether there was even a future for living history.
