In his book Theatres of Memory Raphael Samuel argues impressively that ‘history is not the prerogative of the historian […] It is rather a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands.’ Samuel wants us to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the past is remembered and constructed in the community, and the many different modes in which this is undertaken: in novels, children's books, comic strips, plays, films, television, folklore, songs, paintings and drawings, photographs, children's games, oral stories, debates, ceremonies, museums, monuments, statues, architecture, maps, place-names and postage stamps, among others. Although ‘memory’ has long been thought of as a cognitive capacity of the individual, in the twentieth century the use of the term was extended to cover social phenomena of shared memory in a community. The field of Memory Studies, to which this book largely belongs, has contributed to opening up the study of the construction of the past to envelop both the individual and the social, and the multiple ways that memory of the past is kept alive in many different media and genres in the broad community.

One of the modes of popular memory mentioned by Samuel is historical re-enactment, or ‘living history’ whereby people today dress up as in the past and act as historical personages, usually as guides in museums or as characters in re-enactments of major historical events such as famous battles. ‘Living history’ is powerful in that live interpretation can communicate with the audience by stimulating all the senses and giving the illusion of travelling back in time.