Here’s an interesting story on a cancelled French and Indian War reenactment, brought to my attention by the New York History blog. The Canadian National Battlefields Commission is calling off the 250th anniversary portrayal of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. This was the dramatic British victory that helped break French control over her North American empire. (Here’s more coverage from a Canadian news source.)
The reason? Quebec separatists weren’t too crazy about reenacting a battle that secured British control over Canada, and some of them threatened to use violence and turn the sham battle into an actual one. These guys mean business. Take it from the NBC’s head honcho: “We cannot compromise the security of families and children that would attend the event.”
One of the “hardcore” reenactors featured in Confederates in the Attic proclaimed, “There’s something in me that wishes we could really go the whole way…I’d take the chance of being killed just to see what it was really like to be under fire in the War.”¹ Alright, then. I say let the Battle of the Plains of Abraham go forward, so this fellow can roll the dice and put his money where his mouth is. Super hardcore.
¹Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, 1998; repr. (New York: Vintage, 1999), 16.
Past in the Present 