Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to pageant fever. Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.

Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change-and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of pageant fever can still be seen in Britain today.