This dissertation explores how children (ages five-twelve) engage with the past through performance. Three case studies treating nineteenth-century western US history yield information about a spectrum of performance activities ranging from living history to community theatre to doll play. Reflecting on Richard Schechner's concept of "restored behavior," Paul Connerton's description of how culture is "sedimented" in the body through performance, Joseph Roach's notion of reenactment as a marriage of memory and imagination, and Joni B. Jones argument that embodied behavior is a way of knowing, I demonstrate how children's perspectives and experiences at the Sutter's Fort Environmental Living Program; in the Ramona Outdoor Play; and with the American Girl doll Josefina Montoya support, challenge, and revise such theories regarding how and why we perform the past.

In order to reframe these significant but “adultcentric” notions of performance, I utilize child-focused ethnographic methods that enable me to immerse myself in children's cultures. Working and playing alongside my young informants, I discover how children’s perspectives differ from those of parents, teachers, and other adult supervisors. Reflecting on issues such as historical accuracy, the conception of heritage, the performance of race, and the pedagogical value of enactment, I argue that while young performers may develop a relationship to the history they perform, the features of that relationship are frequently determined by individual interests and interpretation, and not the agendas (benevolent or otherwise) of adult producers.

This project contributes to how we conceive of the mechanics and significance of performance by incorporating accounts of children's experiences into research on public explorations of the past. I argue that performance facilitates the opportunity for children to create their own contexts for historical material, reiterating, contradicting, or re-framing the narratives they are offered. In addition, my findings demonstrate how child-centered methods can offer new perspectives on previously examined social phenomenon, including but not limited to acts of performance.