Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada by Alan Gordon (review)

Black Creek Pioneer Village, Louisbourg, Fort Edmonton Pioneerland, Upper Canada Village, Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons: Canadians who grew up in the mid-twentieth century may well have visited these sites of historical interpretation. Despite their proliferation, though, few have explored their histories: the motivations behind their establishment, the people involved, and the reasons why some sites succeeded so well and others floundered. Alan Gordon's Time Travel seeks to address this lacunae in the historiography. Gordon, a well-respected historian of public memory and commemoration, provides us with a well-researched, detailed, and very thorough exploration of the development of living history sites in Canada.

Their emergence in the post-war decades is, as Gordon points out, no accident. Prior to World War II, those wishing to visit historic sites could stop at a number of fur trade and military forts, particularly in Western Canada and Louisbourg, while those interested in scenes of former domesticity could take in the country's smattering of house museums. The decades after 1945, though, saw an expansion of living history sites in Canada that explored a range of Canadian pasts: the fur trade in northern Ontario and western Canada, eighteenth-century life at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia's history of Scottish immigration, Ontario's pioneer communities, British Columbia's gold rush, and ethnic and religious groups, such as Mennonites in southern Manitoba and Ukrainians in Alberta.

While Gordon demonstrates that provincial, regional, and local politics played important roles in the foundation of these sites, the spread of the living history museum, nevertheless, was shaped by a number of significant, shared factors. For one, those working in museums and historic sites realized that artefacts alone could not be relied on to attract audiences increasingly exposed to historical representations at places such as Disneyland. However problematic its images might be, Disneyland's role in shaping audiences' expectations for presentations of the past was not one that those engaged in historical preservation could ignore. Moreover, living history museums were developed in the context of an ever-expanding state and an economy in which tourism was becoming an important means of boosting revenues and addressing regional disparities. Sites such as Louisbourg, itself the focus of large-scale investments of government funding and historical expertise, were seen as an important way of generating income. As Gordon shows very clearly throughout the book, the development of living history sites was closely intertwined with tourism's expansion in Canada. Tourism, though, was not the only reason these sites were established. Gordon argues throughout the book that living history museums were shaped by struggles to define the meaning of Canada and Canadian identity, struggles that were themselves inflected by debates over Quebec's place in Confederation, multiculturalism, and Indigenous peoples' political mobilization.

Gordon also identifies a key cultural site of contestation: the desire for historical authenticity that such sites embodied versus the need to keep revenue flowing in the form of admission fees and related tourist spending. Moreover, those involved in reconstruction had to come to terms with the fact that authenticity was only ever partly realized; the sites were a melange of guesswork, estimations, and replications that could never achieve the goal of a complete resurrection of the past. Gordon shows that, despite those conflicts and tensions between academics, bureaucrats, and self-styled experts, many of the sites persisted and, in some cases, flourished. He also points to moments, though, when the template for living history museums did not work. Quebec rejected the pioneer village model and developed its own genre, the ecomuseum. In northern British Columbia, the Gitxsan people set up the 'Ksan Historical Village, a place of cultural revival that was not dependent on tourism revenues but, instead, reflected the cultural and spiritual needs of the local community.

Time Travel is an erudite and astute analysis of an important institution on the Canadian commemorative landscape. Equally...