Get into reenactments, make your own costumes, learn how to write with pen and quill and you can go to a demonstration as a reenactor.

“At Antietam, Maryland, in September 1997, I was 2nd Wisconsin, Iron Brigade. This guy had grown a cornfield for us. We got up at 4:30 in the morning, in the pitch black. We marched to a field covered in low-lying fog. My wife, who was a spectator, said she saw us going into cornfields with bayonets fixed. The historical moment was amazing. You couldn’t see anything in front of you. We hit a fence, and there was the Texas brigade. That’s what really happened.”

“And then Gettysburg on its 135th anniversary. There were 30,000 reenactors, battalion after battalion just coming into field. No one sees those kinds of numbers any more. We did a full-scale Pickett’s Charge, with 13,000 Confederates. There we represented the 42nd New York on July 3. I watched those guys get closer and closer. I knew they didn’t have real stuff, but I was getting nervous. Another amazing moment, we were portraying 24th Michigan [...] We had 299 men, and we all took first person and did what happened exactly to that person. I was a corporal in 24th Michigan and I was wounded. That gives you goosebumps.”