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Theme Overview 2023: Reconstructing the Past

Theme Overview
Curriculum Starter Kit
Introductory
Questions

Here We Go Again: Introductory Questions

History Redux
What do you think the world was like a hundred years ago? How about
Re-creation as the exact place where you're sitting or standing or lying down right now?
Recreation Now, how would you actually find out?
If you wanted to learn about a certain time in the past, would you rather
Once More, With
read a book, visit a museum, watch a documentary, or explore an old
New Feelings |
architectural site?
Historical Distortion
Should we ask our parents or grandparents, or other older people in our
ChatGenePT: lives, to tell us what the world was like when they were growing up? If so,
Reconstruction as can we trust them to remember things accurately, or to share them
Resurrection honestly?
What would you ask someone who was alive a thousand years ago, if
Archaeology: The
they popped out of a very high-tech time capsule? Of everyone who was
Telltale Art
alive in the world back then, who would you want to talk to?
Breaking World Does it matter how the world came to be what it is, or should we focus on
Records what it has become—and what we want it to be? In other words, is
reconstructing the past a good use of time when we could instead be
All the Czar's
inventing the future?
Horses: The Politics
Is there a difference between remembering the past and reconstructing
of Putting the Past
it?
Together Again
The phrase "there's no time like the present" is usually meant as an
The Past Has a antidote to procrastination. Do something now, not later. Finish this
Version Control outline today, not in 2024. Taking it more literally, however: is the present
Problem really a unique point in history? If so, does it make it harder for us to
understand what the past was like?
Out of CSIght, Out
"Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is a phrase
of Mind
many people repeat, but is it possible that those who do study history are
Making Them Sing doomed to absorb the worst things about it? Would it be better if we
Again: Opera's could scrub history clean and start over again with no memories of what
Second Act came before us?
Has the pandemic forced a healthy reimagining of past practices, like
On a Nostalgic Note
attending school and working at a real office, or should we go back to the
One Track Forward, way things were?
Two Tracks Back: The director Spike Jonze is credited with saying that "the past is just a
Old Music, New story we tell ourselves." Is it? If so, could reconstructions of the past help
Musicking us agree on what the story is—or will different people reconstruct
different pasts?
Revisiting the
Prologue: Here We Go Again: History Redux
Reconstruction in
Those who find traditional history museums a stuffy procession of rusty
Poetry and Prose
spoons and dusty dioramas may want to explore an open-air alternative:
Journalism: An "living history museums" where one can time travel on the cheap.
Exposé Consider the Spanish Village in Barcelona, where travelers and
scavenging scholars can efficiently inspect 49,000 square meters of
Concluding
historical buildings and tilt at old slides with Don Quixote. At Heritage
Questions
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?
The most famous of these museums can also be the most controversial.
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 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? Would it
ever be okay for someone not of tribal descent to staff the Native
American area of the museum? 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?
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 to go, then discuss with your team: would you patronize
restaurants that served food more like that in the premodern world? 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? 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?
Tomorrowland | Museum of the Future | "World of Tomorrow" (1939)
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
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?
The Oregon Trail | Seven Cities of Gold | Sid Meier's Pirates! | Call of
Duty
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. 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?

Archaeology: The Telltale Art

The British monarch Richard III died in battle in 1485, but, for centuries,
no one knew where his body ended up. In 2012, a team of archaeologists
finally found it—under a parking lot. Analysis of his remains revealed
details (including his scoliosis) that otherwise would have been lost to
history. We are constantly unearthing artifacts that teach us more about
the past; in 2022, researchers unearthed an ancient Buddhist temple in
Pakistan, and, a few years before that, possibly the fastest human in
history. Discuss with your team: what do we gain from knowing these
smaller details about the past? If we had discovered from Richard III's
DNA that he was actually of Mongol descent, or that he was a woman in
disguise, would that change our view of history in a meaningful way?
The remains of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have given us insights
into ancient Roman life that may not have been recorded in any surviving
texts—but that's only because Mount Vesuvius happened to erupt in 79
CE, effectively freezing it in time. Sadly, countless other cities from other
civilizations have come and gone; they weren't lucky enough to get
embalmed by volcanoes. Discuss with your team: if a freak accident (or a
higher-budget Covid sequel) wiped out all life on Earth but left all our
structures, what would an alien anthropologist conclude about how we
lived our lives?
How much does it matter that we try to reconstruct what the world
looked like hundreds of millions of years ago? If it doesn't, at what point
in the timeline should we start trying to reconstruct history?
Investigate the following major archaeological and paleontological
discoveries. What strategies helped uncover them, and how did they
enhance our understanding of history? What circumstances allowed for
these discoveries to be preserved well enough for us to find them so
many years later?
Rosetta Stone | Dead Sea Scrolls | Borobudur | Terracotta Army
Lucy (fossil) | Sue (fossil) | Machu Picchu | Petra | Sutton Hoo

Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and The Land Before Time depict dinosaurs as
giant scaly lizards—and with good reason, as paleontologists used to
picture them that way. But more recent research has suggested
otherwise; it's possible that Spielberg's T. rex should have been a thing
with animatronic feathers. That's what the field of paleoart aims to
visualize, even if the evidence is incomplete. If a future paleoartist tried to
reconstruct our world using incomplete information, what would they get
right? What would they get wrong? Do you think they'd be stumped by
fossil evidence of dogs wearing sweaters?

Terms and techniques

excavation | remote sensing | zooarchaeology & archaeobotany
carbon dating | dendrochronology | pseudoarchaeology

Breaking World Records

There weren't many people writing things down back in the days of
Ancient Greece, which is why it was such a tragedy when the Library of
Alexandria, one of the most expansive collections of texts in classical
civilization, was burned to the ground (possibly). Another ancient library,
the Abbasid Caliphate's House of Wisdom, was destroyed when the
Mongols swept by on their way to Hungary and back again. Discuss with
your team: how does destroying a society's history impact it? What would
happen in our own world if information-tracking resources like Wikipedia
and TikTok suddenly vanished?
On the other extreme lies the Tripitaka Koreana, the most exhaustively-
catalogued collection of Buddhist scriptures in the world. In the 11th
century, Korean monks took 80 years to carve their entire canon into
wooden tablets—and then the Mongols (hello again!) destroyed them all.
Unfazed, the monks tried again, creating over 80,000 woodblocks. Their
effort was worth it; the new tablets have survived for almost a
millennium. Research how they disaster-proofed those tablets using the
technologies they had at the time. Should we adopt similar strategies for
records of our society? Is it possible for us to prepare for events we can't
predict?
If someone invites you to the opening of a time capsule from the year
1800, tell them it's a scam—the first time capsule, the "Century Safe",
dates to 1876, and the term "time capsule" wasn't invented until the 1939
World's Fair. Research these early time capsules and what they
contained, along with this much more recent Polish polar time capsule,
then discuss with your team: what would you put in a time capsule if you
were making one for scholars a hundred years from now? You may also
want to look at the work of the International Time Capsule Society, which
is trying to make sure no one forgets where all the time capsules are.
(And there are apparently more than ever—why do you think that is?)

All the Czar's Horses: The Politics of Putting the Past Together Again
Vladmir Putin is trying to rebuild the former Soviet Union, at least in terms
of Russia's power and influence (and the absence of McDonald's).
Constantine fought to put the Roman Empire back together again—so did
Mussolini. In the United States today, many conservatives long for what
they perceive as periods of lost American greatness: the 1950s, the
1980s, November 2016. Nationalist movements and regimes often gaze
backward, toward a golden age when everything was right in the world,
at least for those in power. Look into other examples of countries
explicitly trying to rekindle the good old days—what some call the
politicization of nostalgia—then discuss with your team: when, if ever, is
should a people look toward their past as a model for what to become in
the future? Put another way, when is it good for a country to become
great again?
Sometimes a particular population within a country tries to return to an
older lifestyle. The British Luddites destroyed their mechanical looms;
New York teenagers are setting aside their smartphones. Consider the
Mennonites in Belize—like the Amish, for whom they're often mistaken,
they prefer horses and buggies over Limes and Teslas—and then discuss
with your team: to what extent should people have the freedom to opt
out of the modern world? If a community wants to teach their children
history only up to a certain year, or to maintain starkly delineated gender
roles, should they have that right? Is there a difference between a group
of people that imposes these restrictions only on its own members and
one that seeks to implement its preferences more broadly?

The Past Has a Version Control Problem

In the 1980s, two Soviet artists-in-exile, Vitaly Komar and Alexander
Melamid, painted the head of Josef Stalin, freed from its body and
perched on a woman's hand. Judith on the Red Square was just the latest
take on another historical moment that may also never have happened.
Consider Komar and Melamid's version together with those below, then
discuss with your team: what story inspired them, and how do their styles
and meanings vary? Is there a difference between showing the act of the
beheading and just its aftermath? And, if, as critics argue, they celebrate
the trope of "female rage", should we still be studying any of them?
Judith Beheading Holofernes | Caravaggio
Judith Slaying Holofernes | Artemisia Gentileschi
Judith and the Head of Holofernes | Gustav Klimt
Judith and Holofernes | Pedro Americo
Judith and Holofernes | Kehinde Wiley

He could be a Super Junior—in 2022, the 10-year-old Andres Valencia

painted Invasion of Ukraine, a work modeled on Pablo Picasso's 1937
Cubist classic Guernica. Where Picasso portrayed, in fractured screams,
the German bombing of a small Basque town, Valencia saw a chance to
critique the similar horror of Russia's recent aggression. Examine both
works and those below, then discuss with your team: how does each vary
from the original, and to what end? Have any other artists created new
works about Guernica based on the actual attack, rather than on
Picasso's painting? Should Valencia have tried to find a more original
approach, or was it a good choice to make his work a homage to an
established masterpiece? And, would Valencia's painting be seen
differently if he were an adult—or Ukrainian?
Backyard Guernica and Saskatoon Guernica | Adad Hannah
Untitled (Guernica Redacted) | Robert Longo
Guernica remastered (works inspired by Guernica)
Guernica in tile
Keiskamma Guernica

Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851) captures a

moment that even in the tense runup to the Civil War had already become
part of America's founding myth: the future first president leading his
men to a pivotal attack on the British. As paintings go, it is iconic; it is also
inaccurate. In 2011, the artist Mort Kunstler revisited the scene more
realistically. Compare his Washington's Crossing to Leutze's, then discuss
with your team: if painted in 1851, would it have become as iconic? Then,
consider a version that critiques not the size of the ship or who is where
on deck, but the founding myth behind all of it: Robert Colescott's George
Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American
History Textbook (1975). It challenges viewers to consider whether
promoting the original version to schoolchildren spreads a founding myth
that marginalizes whole groups of people. Discuss with your team: if you
could print only one of these three works in a textbook, which would you
choose—or would you create an entirely new one?

Sometimes history can't wait. In July 1793, at the peak of the French
Revolution, Charlotte Corday, a minor aristocrat, stabbed the radical
Jean-Paul Marat as he took a bath. Although both were revolutionaries,
she wanted slower change and less murder than he did; she was Mon
Mothma to his Luthen. The unrepentant Corday insisted to the guillotine
that she had "killed one man to save a hundred thousand." Later that
year, the Neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David—whose usual focus
was long-ago history scenes—memorialized the martyred Marat in a
simple painting that inspired two hundred years of replicas and
reinterpretations. Consider his work, as well as the other versions below,
then discuss with your team: should artists wait a certain amount of time
before depicting important political events? Leutze was painting
Washington crossing the Delaware half a century later from across a
much wider body of water; do artists closer to the facts on the ground
have an obligation to portray events more accurately? What do you think
Picasso would have said about this obligation? (Yes, you can ask him on
Character.AI if you'd like.)
Charlotte Corday | Paul-Jacques-Aime Baudry
The Death of John Paul Marat | Engraved by James Aliprandi
The Assassination of Marat | J. J. Weerts
Death of Marat | Gavin Turk

Professional artists aren't the only ones who remake famous artworks. In
the early months of the pandemic, long before the sourdough grew stale,
the Getty Museum challenged everyday people to attempt it with
household objects. Review their efforts, then discuss with your team:
should we add this kind of challenge as an optional event at the Global
Round?

Out of CSIght, Out of Mind

In the opening episodes of Star Trek: Picard, two characters need to
solve a murder in an apartment—but someone has scrubbed the floors,
replaced the windows, and wiped all the alpaca spit from the walls. (The
only eyewitness also exploded.) Undeterred, they resort to an alien
device that can project a blurry hologram of the recent past. Discuss with
your team: if investigators could use such a technology to observe what
had happened in a crime or accident scene, would there be any need for
judges or juries to determine guilt or innocence? Assuming it can only
show you events from the last 24 hours or so, for what other purposes
might such a technology be useful?
According to leading figures in the field, criminal forensics demands more
than just swabbing for DNA and testing flecks of blood; it requires
imagination. Discuss with your team: should prosecutors invest in hiring
screenwriters and other storytellers to reconstruct how crimes
happened? Do you think artificial intelligence could play a similar role in
solving cases—or identifying suspects?
In countries with trials by jury, some prosecutors worry that people who
watch crime dramas on television will have unrealistic expectations of
what forensic science can achieve. This so-called "CSI effect" might lead
them to find defendants "not guilty" if they aren't presented with razor-
sharp fingerprints, perfect DNA matches, and other feats of forensic
wizardry—but these are far harder to obtain in the real world than on
Netflix or the BBC. Then, when forensic evidence is presented at trial,
they might overestimate its importance—discounting other evidence,
such as eyewitness testimony or a robust alibi, that could exonerate the
accused. Discuss with your team: should juries in criminal trials exclude
people who watch too much crime-related television? Is this a real
problem, and, if so, might it also affect judges, journalists, and political
leaders?
Research the following terms related to forensics and crime scene
reconstruction:
Alternative Light Sources | Toxicology | Ballistics
Bloodstain pattern analysis | Patent vs. Latent print analysis
Forensic entomology | Forensic ecology | Forensic genetics
DNA phenotyping | Geolocating with stable isotopes | Cloud forensics

When the media can show actual footage of a tragedy or other

newsworthy event, they do, often exhaustively. Before photography and
cinema, artists had to draw forensic sketches; consider this
contemporary recreation of Lincoln's assassination. Today, if they lack
real footage, broadcasters can generate animated recreations—for
instance, this controversial reconstruction of celebrity golfer Tiger
Woods' car crash in 2019. Discuss with your team: can such animations
serve an important function in informing the public? What is the
difference between animating a news story and reenacting it with live
actors? Should all the people featured in reenactments of recent events
have to give their consent—and, if so, what if they are no longer alive to
give it?

Making Them Sing Again: Opera's Second Act

Perhaps you've been to the opera, but you probably haven't: a 1992 study
found that only 3.3% of Americans had ever sat down in person to watch
a robust person sing, and, while the data is thin, the percentages were
probably lower in many other places—and even lower now, when
attendance at all live events has struggled with Covid and the internet.
Take a moment to explore the origins of opera, then discuss with your
team: what makes it different than Broadway-style musical theater?
Champions of opera have noticed its declining popularity. In Italy, they've
offered young people cheap seats—you can listen to a mezzosoprano for
the cost of a double espresso. Others have reimagined live opera from
the ceiling down as a multimedia experience. Audience members at the
recent premiere of Somnium in China bumped shoulders with roaming
robot rovers; those at a mid-pandemic Rigoletto in Serbia had to worry
less about their toes getting run over and more about frostbite. At both,
an LED screen was such a key player that it could have worn a tuxedo.
Also during the pandemic, one opera company—led by renowned opera
innovator Yuval Sharon—put together a drive-through version of Richard
Wagner's Ring Cycle in a parking garage. Consider these examples, then
discuss with your team: is it possible to reimagine opera in ways so
immersive that they aren't really opera anymore? If so, what is opera
becoming?
Maybe that LED screen wouldn't need to rent a tuxedo after all. Defying a
tradition which many believe can alienate modern audiences and
perpetuate racist and sexist institutions, some orchestras are rethinking
what their performers should wear. Discuss with your team: how much
does the look of a performer matter? Should orchestras allow their
performers to dress in athleisure, or like Lady Gaga—or is there a risk of
distracting from the music? Would it be okay for a conductor to wear
yoga pants? Does forcing all members of an orchestra to follow any dress
code at all, let alone one better-suited for (the men at) a 1920s soiree,
unfairly limit their freedom of expression?
For those who think operas (like subject outlines) are too long for Gen Z
attention spans, the British radio station Classic FM has retooled classics
of the genre into 30-second animated shorts, such as this take on Bizet's
Carmen. Others, worried that opera (like global rounds) can be too
expensive for people to attend and too hard to find outside of large cities,
have tried streaming operas into movie theaters. Discuss with your team:
do you think these approaches can win new converts? Do they sacrifice
anything of what makes opera opera?
Classical works—many of which reflect a white, Western-dominated
cultural milieu—can be reimagined for a more diverse world. Explore this
production of the 17th century opera Orfeo, one that merges parallel
Greek and Indian mythology, songs in English and Hindi, and musical
instruments and styles, then discuss with your team: how well does it
succeed? Can you think of other operas (or musicals, or even Disney
movies) that should be reengineered in a similar way? Is it misleading to
show two traditions coexisting so harmoniously in the same work in a
world where cultures still more often collide than converse—or is it
aspirational? And is the fact that the original opera was an Italian
masterpiece proof that Western culture is still being given dominion over
its Indian counterpart?
China, too, has something of an opera problem: attendance is down,
interest is waning. Enter Donald Trump. A 2019 Cantonese-style opera
about Trump searching for his twin brother in China sold out every
performance. In the United States, so-called "CNN operas"—focused on
recent events—have also become more common in the last few years.
Consider the song "Jones is Not Your Name" from the 2022 production of
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Discuss with your team: should opera
stay away from potentially controversial stories set in the modern world?
Or are there certain political events that are suited to opera—and is that
what draws composers to them?
Opera is not the only genre of music to be reinterpreted for the world
today. Learn about and listen to this new approach to Oliver Messiaen's
Quartet for the End of Time, which he first wrote as a German prisoner of
war. Do you prefer the new version—and do you think Messiaen would
have been okay with it?

On a Nostalgic Note
Everyone (in the senior division and above) has songs that make them
wistful for moments they can never have-ana again, but are some songs
more universally nostalgic? Listen to and learn more about the selections
below, which are widely celebrated as nostalgic masterpieces, then
discuss with your team: what do they have in common? Do they reveal a
formula for making people sad about their lost happiness that future
songwriters could follow? And do they work on you, or are you immune to
their charms—and harms?
The Beatles | Yesterday
Maroon 5 | Memories
Ali Haider | Poorani Jeans
Gao Xiaosong | You Who Sat Next to Me
Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick | Sunrise, Sunset

Magic mushrooms are in the curriculum this year—at least, musically. (We
don't have a round in Portland yet.) Them Mushrooms' Embe Dodo is an
example of a nostalgic musical genre—zilizopendwa—with enduring
popularity in Kenya and Tanzania. It has even inspired academic research
on its implications for East African development. Discuss with your team:
can nostalgic music help a society move forward, or does it do more to
keep people fixated on the past?

When the main character of the time travel film Back to the Future finds
himself in 1955, it's not just the town around him that has changed: it's
the very sounds in the air. Check out the way that his arrival in the past is
choreographed to the hit 1954 song Mr. Sandman, and discuss with your
team: how much does it matter that movies set in the past use music
from that same period?

One Track Forward, Two Tracks Back: Old Music, New Musicking
The Ancient Greeks invented the shower; surely they also invented