It ran strong for many years. The late 1980s and early 1990s probably represented the peak, and it is no accident that the Turner Company film Gettysburg was filmed in 1993, employing thousands of reenactors. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the rage had abated somewhat, and by 2010 some of the reenactors’ regiments had difficulty filling their rosters.

Computers were usually listed as the culprit. The reenactor groups depended on a certain age group of Americans, primarily men in their thirties and forties, who wanted to get away from modern technology and comforts to “rough it” for a period of time. The newer generation, however, those people who grew up with computers from their first days, were less inclined to head for the trees and the reenactment camp grounds.