(Thanks for the pic, Will Dunniway!)   -Member of the Company of Military Historians, National Center for Civil War Photography, and The Civil War Preservation Trust. - Been at this reenacting thing for 8 years. Want to see my first picture? I have no shame. I won't hide it. - Engaged to and madly in love with Annie Pederson. - Avid student of traditional Irish music. |
I'll admit it. I got into this hobby because it was cool. I was into history, sure, but what was cooler than dressing up like Civil War soldiers, camping out, and shooting stuff? I went along this route for about a year and a half, until around the 135th Gettysburg in 1998, when I thought to myself, "This just doesn't seem right." The young historian in me woke up. I began delving into the vast collections of Civil War photographs at the local library and on the internet. What did the gear really look like? What was it made of? How did they wear it, and how did they carry themselves? This led to the discovery of the Library of Congress' amazing online collection of high resolution images. Over the next three years, I studied each of the over 6,000 photographs in their collection, scanning the fore and backgrounds for all the interesting details of the Civil War as it raged. About this same time, I became interested in the civilian aspect of the 19th century, and with my friend Marc Hermann, and girlfriend-turned-fiancée Annie Pederson, we passionately studied the crafts and clothing of the period, and also the turbulent and endlessly fascinating story of New York City during the 1840s - 1860s. Our group The Daybreak B'hoys and Hot Corn G'hals aims to represent that. For my research into Civil War photography, I was named a participant in the History Scholar Program of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and spent a week in June 2005 at Columbia University, meeting with and participating in seminars with prominent historians such as Kenneth T. Jackson, Pauline Maier, Gordon S. Wood, Stephen Mintz, and filmmaker Ric Burns. At the Research Library on 5th Ave., I came centimeters away from an original John Dunlop printing of the Declaration of Independence, and at the New York Historical Society, handled an original Paul Revere lithograph of the Boston Massacre, and a surviving copy of The Vicksburg Citizen, printed on wallpaper. Thus, you can be assured that your coat, trousers, shirts, or signs will be made under the discriminating eye of an historian, and based off of existing examples, and those gleaned from genre paintings and photographs of the period. |
