An event held to mark the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1998, was the largest reenactment ever held, with perhaps twenty thousand participants. Horwitz, who conducted his research just at this moment, developed a theory: All this pageantry was actually politics by other means. He detected a “hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance,” a holding fast to southern white identity, with the resentments of the Reconstruction era still in place, and maybe the racism, too. This explained the time and expense that reenactors committed to the hobby.
