(history is very tricky, its best to discuss your thoughts and ideas with your teammates. glhf)

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 20 and 21 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?