The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg
Alena Pirok
It may be said that Americans have a love–hate relationship with the past — not only because as students of any age some “hate history” while others seek it out but also because the narratives we tell of times and lives long gone are complicated and often incomplete. The venerating of public places, spaces, and memory is also (in certain ways) something new, and how we frame such recreations — as distanced historical analyses or interactive immersions into individual lives — says as much as about our present and future trajectories as the roads already traveled. Colonial Williamsburg, whose history since the American Revolution has swung on a pendulum of essential to all-but-forgotten, provides the perfect case study, as historian Dr. Alena Pirok elucidates in her new book, The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past. Steeped in “ancestral ghosts” that have long sought to speak of a more nuanced past, Colonial Williamsburg and Pirok’s new book shed new light on the American experience. This week, Dr. Pirok joins Leigh and P. T. to discuss how spectral presence is key to understanding our past and our present.
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