Once More, With New Feelings | Historical Distortion

In a recent column, the president of the American Historical Association warns

historians against the lure of presentism—that is, focusing too much on the 20th
and 21st centuries—and against sifting selectively though the past to find support
for their current social agendas. For that, there are sociologists (and the current
Supreme Court). Some critics responded that he was discounting the voices of
marginalized peoples, others that historians have always had agendas and
points of view. Discuss with your team: should historians spend less time on
periods in which injustice was widespread, and more on those in which people
were striving to overcome it? Is it possible to look at the past without interpreting
it through a modern lens? If we could, would we want to?
The invention of the camera in the 1800s changed how we've pictured history
ever since; now we know what things looked like. Where we once had myth, now
we have newspaper clippings. This abundance of images presents a challenge
for those producing stories set in photographed times: to build realistic sets, and
to cast actors who look enough like their historical counterparts to be believable
in those roles. Consider the actors who have played individuals such as Princess
Diana, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln, then discuss with your team: how
important is it that those who play historical figures resemble them physically?
Would it have been all right for a short obese man to play Lincoln in a movie, as
long he grew a beard and wore a hat? What if it were in a play instead, or a
musical? And, once technology permits, will it be better to reconstruct historical
figures with CGI than to try to find human lookalikes?
The musical Hamilton defied the expectation of what actors in historical dramas
should look like (and sound like!) by explicitly casting Black actors as famous
American political leaders and then telling their story in hip-hop-inspired song
and dance numbers. Some have celebrated the way it gives a traditionally
marginalized group control of the narrative; history is being reinvented as their
story, too, and shared with millions of people in a way that casts them as
founding heroes. Others have argued that, while it may seem to empower them,
it actually forces Black actors to play-act as their own oppressors, exalting the
very history that undermined them, and that it may even make modern
Americans feel better about people often assumed to be heroes who actually
owned slaves—such as George Washington. Others worry that the musical
distorts American history into a simple tale of heroes and villains; put another
way, we shouldn't hate so much on Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and
maybe we're overthinking what happened in the room. Explore these and other
debates about the musical, then discuss with your team: does "color-conscious
casting" open doors to new stories and help move society in a progressive
direction, or does it lead to harmful disinformation and the perpetuation of
existing barriers? Can we learn helpful truths from an invented past?
In a sort of inverse of the situation around Hamilton, the director of a play (The
Mountaintop) about the Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. triggered a
controversy in 2015 when he cast a white actor in the title role. His hope, he said,
had been to explore issues of identity and authenticity, especially in light of King's
own words about not judging people by their skin color. The original author of the
play objected, calling it a disrespectful distortion of history and of her intentions.
Discuss with your team: should there be limits to how much one should be
allowed to reimagine the past, or an author's intent, in a historical production? Is
there a difference between casting a person from a privileged group as a
historically oppressed person and casting a person from a historically oppressed
group as a privileged person? And should stories set in the past come with
warning labels about inaccurate content and/or non-traditional casting—or would
no one ever be able to agree on what to write on the labels?
Because early cameras only took black-and-white photos, and serious
photojournalists eschewed color until as late as the 1980s, it is easy to think of
the early decades of camera usage as a bleak and colorless time. Even the Dark
Ages had color—no one speaks of Robin Hood and the Monochromatic
Men—but most of us remember the Great Depression as a gray Depression. It
means those recreating scenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries must
navigate expectations of a black-and-white world. While there were some real
color photographs taken back then, mainly using potato dye, AI and other tools
now allow easy colorizing of old black-white photos. The results may not be
perfect, but they could help people see the past as people saw it then. Discuss
with your team: should colorized photos be shared with students instead of or
beside the originals? Or would doing so be to present something reimagined as
something real?
You can't just look the part; you have to sound it, too. No one knows for sure
whether Abraham Lincoln could have had a post-presidential podcasting
career—accounts suggest his voice was uncommonly shrill and
high-pitched—but the invention of the phonograph soon after his death means
we can now fall asleep to recordings of nearly everyone who came after him. An
actress playing Margaret Thatcher is expected to study her voice diligently, to
match not just her pitch but her every pause. Impressive voice acting can even
spawn viral YouTube videos, as the young actor Austin Butler did here after
playing the role of the country music star Elvis—and supposedly continuing to
sound like him afterward. Research the steps that actors undertake to mimic
voices, then discuss with your team: should people playing historical figures try
as much as possible to sound like they did, or does doing so risk caricaturing
their voices and accents—and distracting from what really mattered about them?
Along the same lines, one of the most famous actors to play Gandhi, Ben
Kingsley, earned widespread acclaim for his performance, but some have
criticized the choice to cast someone of only partial Indian descent as such an
iconic Indian hero—in particular, someone British, when the British were the very
people from whom Gandhi's movement sought independence. Research the
debate about his performance, and then discuss with your team: was it more
acceptable for this kind of casting to take place in the early 1980s than it would
be today? Should the actor's use of darkening makeup for the role make viewers
uncomfortable—and, if so, would it be better if CGI were used to restore his
actual skin color in future airings of the movie?
As for historical figures who were never photographed, artists have long tried to
capture their essence in portraits and sculptures—but now, AI is increasingly
allowing artists like Bas Uterwijk to update those old works with photorealistic
results. Even individuals from a time before art, like the Iceman Otzi, can now
look us in the eye. Discuss with your team: is it valuable to see the faces of
people so far back in the past? Or is it wrong to reconstruct their likenesses
without their permission? Would it be better for our understanding of history if we
were never shown the appearances of people in the past?
American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was almost never
photographed using a wheelchair, despite being paralyzed from the waist down
by polio. Journalists of the era honored his wishes; so did the original designers
of the FDR Memorial in Washington. Only in 2001 did they add a statue of him in
a wheelchair. Discuss with your team: what do you think he would say about the
statue? Should modern portrayals of FDR honor his preferences and continue to
hide his disability? Or, to better capture his experience, should only actors who
are experiencing a similar kind of paralysis play him?
The television series For All Mankind combines archival and original footage to
construct an alternate history of the world, one in which the Soviet Union landed
the first person on the moon. Afterwards nothing was quite the same—but also
not totally different. Consider this newsreel from the show, recapping the late
1970s and early 1980s. Discuss with your team: does it have the quality known
as verisimilitude—that is, does it feel real? If so, what makes it that way? Watch
carefully to identify at least five events that took place differently than in our own
timeline, then discuss with your team: does it seem better or worse than what
actually happened, or just different? Would there be value in constructing "living
alternate history" museums for people to visit, perhaps to help them better
evaluate the actual world? And are there times when reconstructions of actual
history feel less real than they could—or should?
A number of types of sources can be used to decide how to portray a past
person accurately. Work with your team to identify the differences between those
listed below. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Do these
kinds of sources reflect an innate bias in favor of certain kinds of individuals in
certain sorts of cultures?
Biography | Autobiography | Memoir | Journal | Diary
Letters | Newspaper Accounts | Contemporary Footage
Government records | Interviews | Transcripts
The Woman King tells the tale of an West African kingdom, Dahomey, which
battled a rival kingdom that collaborated with white colonizers on the slave trade.
The movie was a welcome post-pandemic hit, but critics noted that Dahomey,
too, had profited from enslaving people and selling them across the Atlantic. The
plot dropped this complexity in favor of clearer lines between good versus evil.
Research other movies that have sparked similar controversies—Braveheart,
Pocahontas, and 300—then discuss with your team: is real history too
complicated ever to reconstruct it for popular audiences without taking
misleading shortcuts? Should we think of all historical fiction less as true stories
and more as alternate histories?

ChatGenePT: Reconstruction as Resurrection

The Jurassic Park movies have drifted from science fiction toward fantasy (they
are arguably the best franchise about fantastic beasts) but they began with a
basis in fact: scientists really are looking for ways to bring extinct species back to
life.
AI may be an important new tool in making it possible. Critics contend that it will
probably never happen and that we should focus our resources on preserving the
species we have left. Explore de-extinction efforts and methods related to the
animals listed below, then discuss with your team: if it were possible, what
species would you want to bring back first? Are there any that we should leave in
the grave (or below the K-T boundary) forever?
American chestnut | Wooly mammoth | Pyrenean ibex
Passenger pigeon | Moa | Dragon | Dodo
Not all efforts to restore extinct species involve locating old DNA fragments and
stitching them back together—for instance, one de-extinction project in Europe is
selectively "back breeding" very burly cows to recreate a wild "supercow", the
auroch, that hunters drove into extinction in the 1600s. If they succeed in
spawning new aurochs just like those in cave art and the fossil record, would we
consider them no longer extinct? Should efforts be made to back-breed tiny
horses, or giant flightless birds, or Neanderthals?
Even if we can't resurrect them, we do have a better sense now of what
Neanderthals looked like. Research how we are now able to envision the "Old
Man" of Shanidar, then discuss with your team: why should we spend so much
time on a species that went extinct so long ago? Is it because some Neanderthal
genes can still be found in modern populations, especially in Europe and Asia?
Would there be value in creating a living history museum with robot
Neanderthals, or with people who dress up like them—or who choose plastic
surgery to look the part?
Sometimes resurrections are just metaphorical. The new leader of the
Democratic Party in the United States Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, recently gave
a stirring political speech; many listeners dubbed him "the next Obama". He was
not the first such. Liz Truss was briefly the next Thatcher, except for some
business with a head of lettuce. If you Google "the next Google", you'll find
endless results, none of which ended up the next Google; it's your turn now,
ChatGPT. The late basketball star Kobe Bryant was supposed to be the next
Michael Jordan; so was Lebron James—or was Lebron James the next Kobe
Bryant? As it turns out, there were multiple next Michael Jordans; most ended up
like these next Peles. Discuss with your team: why is society constantly on the
lookout for new versions of old people and old things?
If you want a selfie with the Pope, you can wait in line at the Vatican and then not
get a selfie with the Pope, or you can pay $25 to visit the Dreamland Wax
Museum in Boston. Discuss with your team: what makes wax museums different
than traditional sculpture collections? Would they still be considered museums if
they featured statues of past celebrities and historical figures slightly modified
from their real-life versions—say, Mother Theresa with wings, or Joseph Harr with
hair—or of people who never really existed, like George Santos and Sherlock
Holmes?
If you want to talk with the Pope—any past pope—you can skip the wax museum
in favor of the nearest Internet connection; the ChatGPT-like service Character.AI
allows you to chat with historical figures. It's okay if they're dead. Explore the
service to assess the value of conversing with these simulated personalities
online. Should celebrities and other figures need to agree to have their "chat
voices" outlive them—or do they surrender that right the moment they enter the
public eye? Do the dead have any ownership over their voices, or can someone
speak for them—and, if the latter, would it be better to ask permission from their
descendants, or from the simulation of them? And should people have access to
chatbot simulations, built from texts, emails, journals, TikToks, and other records,
of their own deceased loved ones? Discuss with your team: what could possibly
go wrong—and what could possibly go right?