History is, almost by definition, dead and buried. Over. It's the challenge of teachers, museum curators, and living-history reenactors to make the past come alive.
"It's difficult," says John Ott, executive director of the National Heritage Museum in Lexington. "Everything is equated against MTV and Disneyland. People want to touch and feel, and we want to create exhibitions the whole family can relate to."
Inside the entrance to that museum hangs a map of Middlesex County from the 1850s. "People stop to find themselves on that map," Ott says. "If you put the right objects with the space, then you get the stories of the people. That's what folks are really looking for."
I recently set out with friends seeking that spark of the past. Our goal was to revisit British General "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne's 1777 campaign south from Canada down what is today the border between New York and Vermont.
We started at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake George in New York. Although the fort was plundered and torn down in the 19th century, it was restored in 1908 and now houses a museum. The imposing, star-shaped stone edifice with a red roof stands guard at the juncture of Lakes George and Champlain.
The British held Ticonderoga in 1775, but just three weeks after Lexington and Concord, a hothead named Ethan Allen, with 40 men behind him, stormed the sleepy fort. A young tour guide dressed in Colonial garb plucked a boy of about 11 from our group and had him play the sentry; the rest of us he enlisted as the Green Mountain Boys. Screaming at the top of our lungs, we charged the hapless lad.
That morning in 1775, Allen pounded on the door of the fort's commander. His memoir says he declared, "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, surrender," but our guide told us that he actually hollered, "Come out of your hole, you stinking rat!"
Allen let the British go. His men unearthed 90 gallons of rum and spent the next two days drinking it up -- we calculated that to be about a gallon per man per day. Two years later, on July 5, 1777, the British regained Ticonderoga.
