 Those who find traditional history museums a stuffy procession of

rusty spoons and dusty dioramas may want to explore an open-air

alternative: "living history museums" where one can time travel on
the cheap. Consider the Spanish Village in Barcelona, where travelers
and scavenging scholars can efficiently inspect 49,000 square meters
of historical buildings and tilt at old slides with Don Quixote.
At Heritage Park in Calgary, Banff-bound hikers can stop to pose for
photos (and eat 19th century ice cream) with locals dressed up as
Canadians from the days of fur trading and the occasional American
invasion. For those who can get visas to China, and local families on
their first post-Covid-zero outing, the Millennium City Park in Kaifeng
offers a hundred acres of life in the Northern Song Dynasty (a
Northern Song Dynasty in which food vendors take WeChatPay).
Discuss with your team: do such living history museums offer
valuable lessons in culture and history, or should we treat them
mainly as entertainment—more Frontierland than the Smithsonian?
Should schools take field trips to them(living history musuems)?
 The most famous of these museums can also be the most
controversial. -research why in general- Consider Plimoth Patuxet in
Massachusetts, where visitors can explore a colonial village and take
selfies with healthy Pilgrims. The museum has recently
been criticized for not paying enough attention to the indigenous
peoples displaced and given smallpox by those same Pilgrims. One
concern: that the tribe members staffing a Native American
settlement recently added to the museum are not descendants (not
authentic) of the actual tribe the Pilgrims first encountered. Discuss
with your team: would it be better if they were—or would this be a
different form of exploitation (repeating history)? Would it ever be
okay for someone not of tribal descent to staff the Native American
area of the museum?(they’d from being slaves (a few centuries back)
to being “mandatory” workers) What if they weren't tribe members
but had adopted tribal practices and cherished tribal customs?
 To make the experience more realistic, some of these museums have
diligently bred versions of animals that look more like their
 counterparts in the past: wilder pigs, gamier hens, dogs that are less
Pomeranian and more wolf. Discuss with your team: is it okay to
breed animals to serve as props in these kinds of exhibits—and
does it make it better or worse if they used for food, or taken home
as pets? (animal rights)
 You may know someone on a "Paleo" diet, meaning they avoid
processed foods on the theory that it is healthier to eat like our
ancestors did 10,000 years ago, when their life expectancy was about
35. (To be fair, on average people died young because the super
young died often—a lot of children never grew up.) Some
archaeologists and historians are interested less in what we should
eat now, however, and more in understanding ancient menus. What
did people call dinner at different times in different places?
Consider this reconstruction of a Roman thermopolium—where a
young Caesar might have grabbed an isicia omentata (research other
meals if u wanna) to go, then discuss with your team: would you
patronize restaurants that served food more like that in the
premodern world? (would be a pretty cool way to connect with
history, smart business model) In North America, at least one chain,
Medieval Times, has made a business of it, though its menu is less
than authentic; for instance, it offers tomatoes, which didn't exist in
Europe before the Spanish invaded Mexico. Speaking of tragedies,
check out this menu from the last first-class meal on the Titanic;
would there be a business opportunity in recreating it, or would
such a business go underwater?
 The Ulster American Folk Park isn't American at all—it's in Ireland.
Visitors can experience the lives of Irish people who moved to the
United States, from boarding crowded ships to sleeping in makeshift
log cabins. Discuss with your team: is it all right for a country to
reconstruct and market another country's history? (think about the
British museum) If someone next door in Scotland were to build a
similar museum about the lives of early British settlers in India or
South Africa, would that be more problematic? Are there some
periods of history that should never be simulated in the real world,
 even if the purpose is to demonstrate to visitors that they were
terrible?
 There are fewer examples of "living future" museums—with good
reason. But they do exist, often at World Expos or in amusement
parks. Consider the following examples of such museums, then
discuss with your team: do they tell us more about the future or
about the past? If you were designing such a museum today, what
would it look like?
o Tomorrowland | Museum of the Future | "World of Tomorrow"
(1939)
o Crystal Palace | American National Exhibition (Moscow, 1959)
Re-creation as Recreation
 Someday, maybe they'll reenact the Great Emu War. While the United
States is most famous for Civil War reenactments (Gettysburg gets a
lot of love) other parts of the world reenact their own key historical
moments—albeit still mainly battles, to the lament of historians who
argue that this overemphasizes the role of war in history. Research
the history of military reenactments. When and where did they
begin—and were they ever meant as a form of training? Do
veterans of the battles being simulated ever choose to take part?
Discuss with your team: is it all right to simulate battles in which one
group of people must represent a cause that we find problematic
today? How long needs to pass before it is okay to reenact a battle?
 To be fair, not every reenactment is about horses and bayonets; some
are less guns and more butter. Research the history of Renaissance
fairs—and try to visit one if you can. How soon after the actual
Renaissance were they first held, and are they the same all around
the world? Then, discuss with your team: are Renaissance Fairs an
unhealthy form of historical escapism? Should there be similar fairs
dedicated to other periods in history?
 In Bruce Coville's 1986 novel Operation Sherlock, six teenagers have
no history teacher—their parents are rogue scientists developing the
 first AI on an otherwise uninhabited island. They learn about the past
by playing historical simulations on their computers. Today, they
could choose from hundreds of games, and their parents would have
funding from Microsoft. But, while simulations are a way to learn
history, critics note that many sacrifice accuracy for better game play
or other considerations—for instance, a game set in a place and time
where women had few rights (research time period, why and when)
might still allow playing as a fully-empowered female character.
Evaluate which of the following games is the most historically
accurate and which would do the best job of teaching history. Are
these two different considerations?
o The Oregon Trail | Seven Cities of Gold | Sid Meier's Pirates! |
Call of Duty
o Ghost of Tsushima | Age of Empires | Assassin's Creed |
Railroad Tycoon
 The first of these games, The Oregon Trail, remains a classic; in its
heyday, millions of American schoolchildren discovered how easy it
was to die of dysentery. But the game has also been criticized for
celebrating imperialism, for discounting the cost of environmental
destruction, and for ignoring the perspective of the indigenous
peoples whose lands were being trampled—it was, in a sense, the
Oregon Trail of Tears. The developers of a more recent
version addressed these concerns with help from Native studies
scholars. Many board games have also been called out for implicitly
endorsing colonialism—as a result, among other things, Settlers of
Catan was renamed Catan. Discuss with your team: what other
games from the list above (or from your own experience) should be
redesigned for similar reasons?
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. (this is such a rich point. Please write like 500 words for
this via your own research) 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? (this is a
beautiful debate, please go crazy over this)
 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 (please watch it or like use sparknotes or
something) defied the expectation of what actors in historical
dramas should look like (and sound like!) (what were the
expectations exactly) 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 (find out
what they did), 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.(learn about him) 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 (how so exactly),
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? (this point is pretty tame, don’t focus much on it unless you
wanna tangentially speak about altering history)
 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(get names),
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? (cool dilemma)
 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?
o Biography | Autobiography | Memoir | Journal | Diary
o Letters | Newspaper Accounts | Contemporary Footage
o 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?