It was soon after 1 p.m.yesterday when a band of Revolutionary soldiers, one of them just 16, emerged from the edge of the forest, muskets blazing. The British navalmen moved into place, taking no casualties, and loaded their cannon.

“Read-ay,” a man wearing a tri-point hat said as he twirled a smoldering charge in the air and touched it to the fuse. The cannon let off an enormous, black powder explosion, sending a five-foot smoke ring barreling down a hill at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Amy Northrop-Adamo, 41, dressed in a hand-made, blue-flower-print dress and an 18th century hat, didn’t so much as blink. She’s been participating in Civil War re-enactments for nearly 25 years.

“This really brings history alive,” Ms. Northrop-Adamo, the executive director of the Fraunces Tavern museum in Lower Manhattan, said. “For so many people, history is such an abstract thing. This makes it real. This really happened.”

The community of battle reenactors is a close-knit one, she said. Some of them perform at more than 12 re-enactments a year. They own their own handmade clothing, and she owns the cannon, which she keeps in a trailer outside her home. The reenactors were part of the Second Continental Artillery Regiment, based in New Jersey.

Yesterday’s re-enactment was to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn. Two thousand Revolutionary soldiers died and another 1,000 were captured on August 27,1776. The British lost just 300 men, but a small group of Revolutionary soldiers courageously launched a counterattack that allowed many of their brethren to escape.

Ms. Northrop-Adamo’s 4-year-old daughter, Arden, has been participating since she was four weeks old. Her husband, Mark Adamo, 49, died in May, and she said the re-enactment community was there to support her.

“I buried him in his regimental coat,” she said. “There was a musket salute and a cannon salute. Four different units came from across the Northeast.”

Historical re-enactment is a passion tinged not with just a fascination with history, but also a genuine nostalgia.

“There was a sense of community. It was pretty rough back then, but people were courteous to each other,” a British artillerist with a heavy moustache, James Bowen, 48, said. Mr. Bowen is an industrial designer in New Jersey, and became interested in historical re-enactments just five years ago. In that time, he has attended about 60 re-enactments — from events with hundreds of participants to battles like yesterday’s, with less than 20.

The muskets, clothing, cannon, and other materials are almost all replicas made by another group of reenactors, who create objects from historical eras using only the kinds of tools and supplies they would have had.

“I love history. I love doing this,” a parks ranger from Staten Island and part-time British artillerist, Michael Callahan, 49, said. Of his entire outfit, only two things weren’t replicas: a pair of small square spectacles he bought at an antique store, and his underwear.

“The truth is, they didn’t wear underwear,” a fellow artilleriest, Richard Cuneo, said. “We have health standards nowadays.”

It was a consensus among the reenactors that New Yorkers had a stronger interest in their hobby than they had expected. Gaggles of Brooklynites and history buffs with digital cameras, video cameras, and camera phones pushed close to the reenactors and cheered with the cannon’s deafening booms.

The field is a short walk from Battle Hill, the highest point in Brooklyn. Viewed in a larger frame, yesterday’s scene was just one part of the city’s tangled history. Looming above the clouds of musket fire were a Citgo gas station sign and a 1960s-era sign advertising “Worldwide Furniture Warehouse.” Behind those was a church steeple covered in black renovation material, the top of a chemical plant, and, beyond them, the Statue of Liberty.