Telling History: A Manual for Performers and Presenters of First-Person Narratives, and: Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting Servants' Lives at Historic House Museums (review)

Joyce Thierer's Telling History is by turns a resource for would-be storytellers and "Chataquans" and a guidebook for museum and historic-site professionals looking to beef up their programming with costumed performance. It is also a one-stop shop for Thierer's collection of stories and anecdotes, which appear throughout as witty "trail stories" in boxed text, published for the first time between two covers. Fans buying the book for this last purpose, she writes, are the ones who will want the author's autograph on the inside cover.

Indeed, Thierer styles herself as not only an authority on the subject (historical performance), but one of its consummate celebrities. She spends the better portion of her introduction (cleverly subtitled "Read before Dissembling") unapologetically laying out her "bona fides" in order to establish her credibility, which is fair enough. She also gives a personal account of her own early adversity in school, and her struggles to pull herself up by her bootstraps and overcome self-doubt—which again lends some amount of authorial legitimacy. She goes on, though, to anticipate that some readers will want her to sign their copies (ix), to describe her mantle of authority as being "pure velvet" (ix), and to use her own quotes as epigraphs to frame her chapters. This is not to criticize: part of what makes this book enjoyable has everything to do with the frank, shoot-from-the-hip prose, in keeping with Thierer's signature character Calamity Jane. I, in fact, count myself among the fans of her characters.

The book delivers on each of its promises. Herein, museum practitioners will find tried-and-true how-to lists on choosing and researching characters, scripting a performance, assembling costumes, dealing with audiences from children's groups to nursing homes, and best practices for freelance performers, all presented with sound advice and pointed cautions on what to avoid. The final chapter outlines Thierer's own "dreams and plans" for future custodians of historical performance, including maintaining a strong Internet presence and working proactively to develop programs that can meet the changing public-school standards set by "No Child Left Behind."

Students and scholars of living historical performance will find chapter 1 most helpful. Thierer offers a new taxonomy of "Performed History Interpretation," with a carefully constructed Venn diagram parsing out the fine lines between "Atmospherics" and "Impersonators," "Talking Tombstones," and "Story Tellers" and how these each differ from living history (pageants and the Society for Creative Anachronism). This diagram alone does much to improve upon the time-worn and sometimes unaccommodating categories established by living-history analysts up until now (for example, Freeman Tilden, Jay Anderson, Stacy Roth, and, to be grudgingly honest, myself). What the author terms "historical performance" (combining the look of the impersonators with the storytelling skills and the historical context of the other areas) falls squarely in the center. Historical performers start with a strong, entertaining, and virtuosic first-person script, then answer questions in character, and finally break character to answer questions at the end as an informed historian and scholar. Despite Thierer's protest that her taxonomy is not hierarchical, clearly this special space is home to those few first-person historians at the top of the heap—and, if you haven't figured it out by now, this is where Thierer places her own work.

The book does not attempt to navigate some of the politics and complexities of living-history performance. Thierer's overarching goal is to help match up museums and historic sites with the right kind of historical performer, emphasizing the blend of accuracy and compelling story that works best for particular institutions' goals...