What Is a Live Twitter Reenactment, Anyway?

In 2019, Jaclyn Kelly, an educator from the Milwaukee Public Museum came to me in search of a permanent course partner for a project that she had been running since 2015. In a series of four live Twitter reenactments of historical Milwaukee events, students and other volunteers had used words, images, and hashtags in a coordinated set of tweets to re-create standout moments of local history as if they were happening in the present. Together they told the stories of the 1892 Third Ward Fire (2015), Milwaukee’s Ice Wars (2016), the 1939 Green Bay Packers championship game against Giants (2017), and the 1940 Armistice Day storm (2018). By the time Ms. Kelly left my office, partnering with MPM on the annual reenactment had become the core of my vision to revive History 450, UWM’s class on the history of the Milwaukee area.

What is a live Twitter reenactment, you ask? Even people who are not professional historians are fascinated by history. Adult Americans willingly use their leisure time to absorb history through relatively passive means—in the form of memoirs and biographies, books about history written by professional and amateur historians, in movies and TV shows. They also take part in more active approaches to exercising their historical imaginations by immersing themselves in recreated historical contexts: they attend Renaissance Fairs, visit living history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and Old World Wisconsin, and participate in cosplay and live reenactments of Civil War battles. A live Twitter reenactment brings the elements of historical reenactment to the fast-moving microblog platform. Participating educates both those who put it on and those who read the tweets.

In a live Twitter reenactment, participants reconstruct a specific historical event on Twitter, from the point of view of actual and composite historical “characters” who did (or might have) participated in it or observed it as it was occurring. Before they start, reenactors research the event and their specific characters, draft and revise Tweets from their character’s point of view, and sequence their release with the whole group. Finally, during the designated live-tweeting period, participants release their tweets to the world, in the pre-planned order, in one sitting. They can also make their reconstruction of the past more vivid Twitter enhancers such as @tags, hashtags, images, and links.

As the American Historical Association is constantly reminding us, everything has a history—including Twitter reenactments. As far as I have been able to learn, the idea of the Twitter reenactment originated with a group of graduate students at Utah State University led by Marion Jensen. They developed a practice and a website called Twhistory, which they described in a short open access 2010 article. Brian A. McKenzie, of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, published a longer article in The History Teacher about how his class reenacted the Battle of Stalingrad and the Paris Commune in 2012. A crucial refinement of McKenzie’s reenactment included posting Tweets with a shared hashtag such as #stalinsim[1] that allowed the Twitterverse to watch the reenactment unfold and to search for it later. McKenzie writes that he “encouraged students to think of [their] tweets as roughly falling into one of three categories: direct, first-hand tweets—for example a Communard tweeting about the fall of Courbevoie; indirect, second-hand tweets, such as Zhukhov tweeting about the capture of a factor; and ‘ideational’ tweets illustrating inferred expectations, attitudes and opinions.”[2]

Several history instructors in Midwestern US universities have also incorporated Twitter reenactments into their curricula. Reenactors at the University of  Kansas recreated the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, while a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay centered local history with a reenactment at the Green Bay Fire of 1880. Residents of Lawrence, Kansas (home of the University of Kansas) used the public library to reenact Quantrill’s Raid from US Civil War. Alwyn Collinson, a one-person Twitter reenactor based in the United Kingdom, tweets to more than half a million followers from @RealTimeWWII. As you might expect from the handle, Collinson’s goal is to “livetweet the Second World War as it happened on this date in 1942 & for 4 years to come (2nd time around).”

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where History 450 will re-debut in fall 2020, the collaboration with the Milwaukee Public Museum uses three main criteria for choosing topics. The ideal focus event 1) relates in some way to the STEM fields, which is an important MPM education area; 2) allows us to showcase archival collections held at UWM; and 3) is somehow related to the history of the Milwaukee area.

For our inaugural event, we have selected the first official weather forecast in the United States, which was issued by Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham on November 8, 1870. Since 2020 marks the 150^th anniversary of that forecast, it seemed like the perfect kick-off event for History 450. On Thursday, November 5, 2020, the class will release our Twitter reenactment (hopefully from inside the Public Museum, depending on the state of the pandemic). Please follow our work and the reenactment itself with the hashtag #mke70. If you can’t wait until November to know what the weather will be like, Increase Lapham’s 1870 forecast is available here, on the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

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[1] Clearly #stalinsim is short for “Stalin simulation,” but it also appears to be a frequent misspelling of “Stalinism.”

[2] Brian A. McKenzie, “Teaching Twitter: Re-enacting the Paris Commune and the Battle of Stalingrad.” The History Teacher 47 (3) (2014): 355-372.