Having finished my first year as a grduate student in public history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I've finally begun to put words to what has been echoing at the back of my mind all year. The first of these thoughts is the confession that being the lone living historian among academic historians is an experience. Misconceptions between these histories run rampant. There are, of course, the surface tensions: the ongoing attempts to explain I have spent as many hours with the Iowa census records for 1850 or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Goodwives as I have spent chasing after sheep. It takes a fair amount of scholarship to run a period farm.

But at least these discussions acknowledge the living history field. Public history does not necessarily always acknowledge living history as one of its tenets. In the section on museums, I read article after article pleading for museums to blend scholarship with hands on experience and wondered where in the world these people are doing their research. Not a living history museum had crossed their radar screen, and yet what they pleaded for sounded remarkably familiar.

But the tensions lie deeper still. I began my year with American historiography and public history and finished it with more historiography and material culture. And there's something about the academic history world that disturbs me. Basically, I see an idenity crisis within the academic history field.

Let's see. Do we tell American history the way we've always told it? Begin with the Pilgrims and keep going down the line? Or do we tell African-American history? Or women's history? Or labor history? Do we tell it from the bottom up? Or what about doing it from the top up this week? These decisions wrought my year in historiography, shaping both book choice and class discussion. And there's no denying these questions shape the living history field as well. The move to tell stories of women and African-Americans at Colonial Williamsburg is a clear indication of this.

Yet where the difference between academic and living history really lies for me is the audience for these wranglings. In the end, the conversations between the academic historians become just that: conversations between academic historians. Does anyone else care how these professors in their ivory towers are interpreting and reinterpreting history? Is anyone even listening? In contrast, when the day gets going, there are people on our doorsteps. As living historians, we rarely have the luxury of time enough to contemplate these differentiations. Time away from interpreting to research is more precious than gold. Yet there is something incredibly important about what we do.

I also recognize it's easy for me to make these statements. The last time I actively interpreted for forty hours a week was nearly a year ago. Now that I'm away from it, I idealize it a little. I make statements about its pure glories. When I interpret, I get frustrated with the same questions over and over again. History is relegated down to a few basic concerns. Are you hot in that dress? Is that real? In contrast, what I want is to push the deeper ideas farther. What happened to suddenly drive the move towards spinning wheels in the 1200s after thousands of years with drop spindles? How did it feel to head west and move fifty years backwards in time with household technologies?

So, you could argue in this respect, anyway, I'm right back to the academic historians. Like them, I'm theorizing and I'm making decisions about the history I want to tell. About the ten basic questions inherent to every site, there are things I leave out and things I include. When I interpret, I tend to focus on women's domestic life in the past, be it textile or culinary or garden history. But the difference remains. Having made the decision about what history to tell, I tell it. One of the greatest joys of being a living historian is that no mattter what story you tell, there will be people listening and they won't only be other academics.