Restaging the Past

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Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past. They also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Pageants took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organized groups, from Women's Institutes to political parties to schools, churches, and youth organizations. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of 'pageant fever' remain in evidence today.