Exhibition Reviews

Edward T. Linenthal and Kym S. Rice Contributing Editors Introduction The contributing editors encourage readers to suggest representations of history in American public culture that might be reviewed. In addition to continuing coverage of museum exhibitions, they are interested in covering living history projects, historical pageants and reenactments, memorials, historic preservation projects, and virtual museums. Please contact:

Edward T. Linenthal	Kym S. Rice
Department of Religious Studies	Museum Studies Program
University of Wisconsin	George Washington University
Oshkosh, WI 54901	2035 F St., NW
etl@uwosh.edu	Washington, DC 20052
	kym@gwu.edu

"1699: When Virginia Was the Wild West!" DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, 325 Francis St., Williamsburg, VA 23185.
     Temporary exhibition, May 1, 1999–Jan. 31, 2000. 3,600 sq. ft. Cary Carson, project director and historian; Jan Gilliam, William Pittman, and Jonathan Prown, curators; Lisa Gusler, education curator; Rick Hadley, designer.
     When Virginia Was the Wild West!: A Williamsburg Comic Book. By Brian Stelfreeze, illustrator, and Meloney Crawford Chadwick, consultant. (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1999. 40 pp. $2.95, ISBN 0-87935-210-8.)

They say the past is a foreign country—and so, apparently, is Colonial Willamsburg. As legions of detractors delight in reminding us, the early American past served up there adheres to a narrative script far tidier (not to say whiter, richer, and comelier) than the historical record could be said to support. The anachronistically well manicured complex, with its cozy inns and elegant "shoppes," only adds to the sense of a past that never truly was. How, after all, to differentiate between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first when you can listen to a Caribbean slave impersonator, sip an iced cappuccino, and read about Roman villa architecture at Rizzoli, all in sixty minutes' time and in the space of two or three city blocks?

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