I've heard rumors of some sort of massive discourse over at the AIA conference about completely separating the academic community from Roman Reenactment due to "widespread white supremacist motivations" for reenactment.

I want to talk about this. (1/?)
#ClassicsTwitter

I'm going to tag @eranudturan in this from the start because I want his opinion as both a PoC and a non-European reenactor, but I've been thinking about this all day and have some thoughts I want to express and would like to hear feedback on. (2/?)

Reenactment as a whole very much has imperialist roots. The earliest reenactments basically started as 18th century recreations of battles and tourneys, often associated with festivals hosted by lords. Renaissance festivals also have athe same roots in their origins. (3/?)

The hobby mostly originates in Britain, with some crossover into other parts of Europe. Reenactment in America, however, actually developed mostly separately from the British and European communities. It almost purely stems from Civil War veterans. (4/?)

Civil War veterans (Union and Confederate) in the late 19th and early 20th century started having anniversary meetups, and began recreating battles they fought at. They weren't the only ones - Indian Wars and Zulu Wars veterans also started doing it at about the same time. (5/?)

Their children started to carry this on, and it was really the 1961 Civil War centennial Battle of Antietam celebration that kicked off reenactment as a serious hobby worldwide. It grew quickly into other eras from there, but Roman hadn't shown up yet. (6/?)

So while the rest of reenactment has its history laden primarily in white supremacy and imperialism, Roman reenactment surprisingly mostly does not. Attempts at recreation Roman military costume and displays of Roman military tactics go back to the 19th century... (7/?)

With various well-endowed early archaeologists and historians, the U.S. Naval Academy, and others all partaking in such demonstrations, but these were largely one-and-done events. Roman Reenactment truly doesn't begin until the founding of the Ermine Street Guard in 1972. (8/?)

I don't have the resources to explicitly go into the motivations of the individuals who founded it, but the society was founded as part of a restoration project for two town halls in Witcombe and Bentham village. As far as I am aware, it doesn't have ties to the (9/?)

origins of other eras of reenactment, although its founders very well could have had seen and wanted to do something similar to other-era reenactors in the growing hobby were doing. Again, I don't have the resouces to fully investigate it. (10/?)

This one unit basically started Roman Reenactment as a thing for all of Europe, and eventually it came across the Ocean with a man named Matthew Amt, who is undoubtedly the man who made Roman and Greek reenactment in the United States a thing. (11/?)

Amt's background comes not from other areas of reenactment, but Cosplay, the SCA, and LARP. Now we can talk about white supremacy in those subcultures too, but I'm not terribly read up on them and it's largely irrelevant to Matt and his motivations. (12/?)

Matt was a guy who wanted to take what people were starting to do for Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, and apply it to Ancient Greece (and later Rome), but with real historical research. And he got his footing with the help of the first European groups, including the ESG. (13/?)

From the get-go, Roman Reenactment, particularly in the U.S., was different. Its focus wasn't really on glorifying a "lost cause" or "western civilization," or at least it wasn't in the same way (it has slowly progressed as Academia has slowly progressed). (14/?)

Instead it was largely founded for Experimental Archaeology, research, and reconstruction. This doesn't mean Roman reenactment doesn't have problems with white supremacy or imperialism (it certainly does) but it wasn't founded on those issues like other eras were. (15/?)

(Caveat: I can't be sure about Byzantine reenactment's precise origins (other than that it comes from Australia), as I would have to talk to Dr. Timothy Dawson and Peter Beatson first. But I can assure you that neither of them have white supremacist motivations.) (16/?)

Now that I've made this particular point, I want to move on to how it *does* have issues with this, and this namely comes from the type of people attracted to reenactment, which can vary widely, and so can their motivations. But there is a definite pattern. (17/?)

Generally speaking, the more someone wants to fight in reenactment, the more they tend to have far-right or alt-right leanings. However that doesn't always apply, and I'm going to use Bohurt vs. HEMA as the example here, because there's a correlation between these. (18/?)

I am not trying to disparage Bohurt or my friends who do Bohurt in any way here. However, generally speaking the people who do Bohurt seem to not have much interest in the actual history and research behind medieval combat, compared to those who partake in HEMA. (19/?)