My husband and I actually went on a vacation for five days last week. We can't usually make our schedules coincide, but mid-May worked (for the same reason it worked 10 years ago for our wedding). Being history geeks, we spent three days at Colonial Williamsburg. I especially recommend the evening "gambols" at Chowing's Tavern.
Parts of the interpretation are wonderfully complex - we saw a good two-woman show about Oney Judge, who grew up as Martha Washington's slave, escaping to freedom while living at the President's House in Philadelphia. The show did a great job of exploring Oney's choice to take uncertainty and freedom over luxury and slavery. You can learn more about this story by visiting the President's House while we're in Philadelphia - it's adjacent to the Liberty Bell pavilion and its interpretation/recreation was a subject of much debate.
One of the interpreters, portraying the printer/publisher of one of Williamsburg's newspaper, was annoying in that he didn't do a good job of engaging people who joined the group during the conversation. He was very good at making one point though - for this individual, it was 1774. He could not imagine that the escalating dispute with Britain would result in violence. In 1774, independence wasn't inevitable.
It's sometimes hard to remember that history is a series of choices - a choose your own adventure. At any point, a different choice could have been made. The constructs of time travel and parallel universes in science fiction often make my head hurt, but there's an interesting idea that we have to remember - every decision is a choice. I don't know if they lead to the creation of a parallel universes, but it while it is inevitable that there will be a future, what that future is will be the results of many choices yet to be made.
So how can you make history surprising again?
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