Guiding Questions for Teaching The Last Archive

Every time we post a new episode of The Last Archive, we post links to our key sources on our Episode pages. Here we’ll also post some questions that might help start a class discussion, or keep one going!

 

Season 4

Episode 6: The Krononauts

Guiding Question: What kinds of themes and ideas does time travel, as a plot device, allow stories to explore? Do you think time travel stories are especially relevant to the experience of the pandemic?

Additional Questions:

  • The idea of time travel didn’t really exist before the late 19th century. Why do you think it arose when it did?

  • Write a time travel story about the pandemic. What did time travel allow you to express about that moment in history?

Episode 5: Callings

Guiding Question: In what ways was the phone part of 20th century American evangelism? What led to that being the case?

Additional Questions:

  • Go to our key sources and check out the archival films made by the telephone companies in the mid-century. How were they selling the idea of the telephone? What anxieties were they trying to put to rest? How do the phone company pitches map onto the way we think of telephones now?

  • New communications technologies like the telephone are often thought to change society. Do you think telephones, laptops, smartphones, televisions and other technological advances have changed the fundamental nature of our society? Or do they rather help express things that already exist in it?

Episode 4: Acting Out

Guiding Question: ‘Dual use’ is a term often used for science that can be used for good or ill. In what ways can you imagine Moreno’s theories as ‘dual use?’

Additional Questions:

  • The training school is both a progressive place, and place of punishing social control. Describe both aspects — how are they in tension or in agreement with each other?

  • J. L. Moreno’s ideas emerged from his life experience. What are the steps in the story that take his idea of sociometry from whimsical notion to established field?

Episode 3: Parakeet Panic

Guiding Question: How do scientists draw lines between what’s natural & unnatural? Looking at the case of the parakeets, how were those boundaries crossed and what value do you think they have?

Additional Questions:

  • The Limits to Growth & the panic about invasive monk parakeets both involve knowledge produced by prediction — how are those predictions made?

Episode 2: The Word For Man Is Ishi

Guiding Question: What stories have been told about Ishi over the past century, and what political or theoretical work are those stories doing?

Additional Questions:

  • What relationships do you see between science-fiction and anthropology?

  • Read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Using the framework of the story (stay vs. walk away), how should citizens of the United States today think about the country’s relationship to the genocide of American Indians?

Episode 1: Player Piano

Guiding Question: In what ways are Raymond Scott’s Electronium and ChatGPT similar?

Additional Questions:

  • Why would corporations be interested in automating the creative process? What would the consequences of that automation be? Do you think the creative process can be automated?

  • Choose a hit song. Look at the lyrics. Using ChatGPT and, without reference to the original song, prompt it to write a song similar to the one you chose. You can refine your prompts as you go until you get a version you’re satisfied with. Compare both: What’s the same, what’s different?

Season 3

Episode 1: Information, Please!

Guiding Question: Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen were selling “the sum of human knowledge.” Why was their pitch so successful in the 20th century, and how has Wikipedia updated it?

Additional Questions:

  • Choose a Wikipedia page you like. Now imagine it had been written by a panel of experts like the old school Encyclopedia Britannica. What would be different about it? Rewrite it using the information on the Wikipedia page. What changed?

  • What types of differences exist between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica? Are those differences valuable?

Episode 2: Trial By Teenager, Part I

Guiding Question: What is the difference between a fact and an opinion?

Additional Questions:

  • In this episode, The Last Archive tests out an idea: What if juries of high school students fact-checked political ads to see if they were true enough to go up on social media? What changes would you make to our jury design?

  • Should social media companies have to fact-check political ads before allowing them on their platform?

Episode Three: Trial By Teenager, Part II

Guiding Question: The high schoolers are meant to determine if something is ‘true enough’ to post on social media. How would you define the threshold for ‘true enough?’

Additional Questions:

  • How does the role of the jury in our experiment differ from the role of a courtroom jury?

  • Try the fact-checking exercise on a political ad from your home state. What sources did you use? How true was the ad?

Episode Four: The Tree Branch

Guiding Question: Imagine that an Environmental Rights Amendment had actually passed in 1972. What do you think would be different about the United States today? What would it not have changed?

Additional Questions:

  • This episode relies on a counterfactual argument — imagining something that didn’t happen actually did. What do you think is the value of stories and hypotheticals in examining and retelling history?

  • Imagine the Tree Branch really had passed. What would representation by state look like based on the number of trees in each state? Model it. How would it have changed American politics?

Episode Five: The Farming Game

Guiding Question: How do you weigh the vanishing of a way of life, the family farm, against the increase in domestic food production? Was it worth the tradeoff? What are the social and environmental effects you can trace from that shift?

Additional Questions:

  • Pick a job or an industry and try making your own board game about it on the model of the farming game. What rules help make it more realistic? What’s the goal of the game? How do you make it fun?

  • How does turning something into a game change how you think about it? What’s the difference between practicing something and playing a game version of it? Another way to think about it: What truth do games hold?

Episode Six: Good Boy

Guiding Question: Does it make sense to compare animal and human intelligence? Are people smarter than animals, or are we just different?

Additional Questions:

  • If you have a pet, design a (safe & gentle) study to test their memory. Write up an abstract & a method section.

  • Dr. Dolittle was a fictional animal scientist, but Hugh Lofting had genuine insight into how animals think. What can stories tell us that science can’t, and vice versa?

Episode Seven: Weather Vane

Guiding Question: Meteorology comes from wartime science. What vestiges of the military do you see in the way you think about the weather, and how do you think weather prediction would be different if it hadn’t come from war?

Additional Questions:

  • How does the work of predicting the future change your relationship with the present?

  • What other ideas and technology in your daily life stem from war?

Episode Eight: The Lost Archive

Guiding Question: In this episode, Jill Lepore visits the archive in her hometown library. Look up your hometown library, write the librarian, and ask what primary sources they have in their archive. Pick one, research it, and write to tell us about it at [email]

Additional Questions:

  • How was your hometown founded? To what degree does the origin story of your town shape the way you and your friends think about it today? How so?

  • If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably listened to a lot of The Last Archive. What does it all add up to? Do you think differently about truth and doubt now? Write in and let us know.

Season 2

Episode 1: Monkey Business

Guiding Question: How was the Scopes Trial a “show trial?” Beyond challenging the Tennessee State Legislature’s law, what were the defense’s main objectives in the trial?

Additional Questions:

  • How would you describe the difference between doubt and skepticism?

  • Socrates thinks there’s a tension between majority rule and scientific truth — does there have to be? How do we balance democracy and science today?

  • In what ways did mass media influence the trial?

Episode 2: Believe It

Guiding Question: How does the radio serve as a metaphor for the internet in this episode?

Additional Questions:

  • How did radio change the way that people consumed news in the early 20th century?

  • What differences can you observe between Bob Ripley and Pedro González’s radio shows?

  • Is today’s sentiment that ‘everything is a lie or a fake’ different from the culture of hoaxes on 1930s radio? How so?

Episode 3: The Inner Front

Guiding Question: Is lying justified in wartime? What’s the difference between a lie and a story, and what narratives can you find at play in this episode?

Additional Questions:

  • Why do you think radio uniquely suited to psychological warfare?

  • What role does the media and journalism play in maintaining democratic institutions, values, and truth?

  • What role did radio propaganda have in the discrimination and internment of Japenese Americans during the war?

Episode 4: Repeat After Me

Guiding Question: How do people establish boundaries between science, spirituality, and hoaxes? Who is drawing those boundaries in the story of Bridey Murphy, and where do the borders lie?

Additional Questions:

  • What makes evidence “scientific?” Who gets to decide?

  • What do you think the truth of the Bridey Murphy story was?

  • Why do you think Bridey Murphy’s story became so popular in the 1950s? Would it be just as popular today?

Episode 5: Remote Control

Guiding Question: Can we know something if we don’t have first hand experience of it? How?

Additional Questions:

  • What’s the relationship between science, the media, and conspiracy theories today?

  • How do you think media and social media platforms can help viewers and listeners tell the difference between fact and fiction?

  • What incentives did President Kennedy, President Johnson, and the American people at large have to conquer the moon? How might these incentives have influenced the flourishing of conspiracy theories?

Episode 6: It Came From Outer Space

Guiding Question: What parallels do you see between the moon plague, the andromeda strain, the 1976 swine flu scare, AIDS, and COVID-19?

Additional Questions:

  • What role does race play in the emergence of doubt about science in the second half of the 20th century?

  • What are the commonalities between Michael Crichton’s novels and conspiracy theories? What differences do you see?

Episode 7: Children of Zorin

Guiding Question: What differentiates propaganda from journalism? What makes a story true?

Additional Questions:

  • How did movies and Hollywood films influence the rise of conspiracy theories in the latter half of the 20th Century?

  • What domestic political factors led to the rise of conspiratorial thinking like H.L. Hunt’s?

Episode 8: Hush Rush

Guiding Question: Could the Fairness Doctrine solve polarization on social media if it were around today? What kind of rule would you propose?

Additional Questions:

  • How would you define ‘fake news’?

  • How does the business of media influence its politics? If you were building the U.S. media ecosystem from the ground up, on what principles would you organize it?

Episode 9: Epiphany

Guiding Question: Why do you think people refused to accept that the Report From Iron Mountain was a fake? Do people really believe it?

Additional Questions:

  • This episode identifies the rise of the modern conservative movement as a key factor in the decline of several knowledge-making institutions. What sort of institutions have risen in those institutions’ stead, and how are they different from what came before?

  • Do you buy the political argument? If you were to argue the same about the modern left, what would you say?

Season 1

S1 Episode 1: The Clue of the Blue Bottle

Guiding Question: What is a fact?

Additional Questions:

  • Where does trial by jury come from?

  • Are rules of the evidence the same over time, or do they change?

  • What’s the relationship between historical research and criminal investigation?

  • How has the idea of “mystery” changed over time?

  • How do newspapers affect the history of knowledge? What about photographs?

  • How would you rank the credibility of each of the types of evidence used in this episode?

S1 Episode 2: Detection of Deception

Guiding Question: What is testimony?

Additional Questions:

  • What’s the difference between knowledge that comes in the form of “facts” and knowledge that comes in the form of “numbers?”

  • Is knowing things from facts more fair than knowing things from numbers?

  • What’s the relationship between historical research and criminal investigation?

  • What did people think about replacing trial by jury with trial by lie detector?

  • Did learning about the Frye case change how you think about Wonder Woman?

S1 Episode 3: The Invisible Lady

Guiding Question: What is considered private, and who gets to decide?

Additional Questions:

  • How do people understand things they can’t see?

  • How did early radio affect the history of knowledge?

  • How do new technologies change our ideas of privacy?

  • What makes somebody invisible?

  • How do historians deal with the asymmetry of the historical record? About what people do we tend to know more, and about what people do we know less?

S1 Episode 4: Unheard

Guiding Question: How do we record history?

Additional Questions:

  • Are novels historical evidence?

  • Why did people begin collecting oral histories during the Great Depression?

  • What should we do with the WPA slave interviews? Is it okay to use them as primary sources?

  • How would you describe Ralph Ellison’s struggle and achievement as a writer?

S1 Episode 5: Project X

Guiding Question: When does predicting an outcome change it?

Additional Questions:

  • What was controversial about the first televised political advertisements?

  • Is there a difference between using TV advertising to promote commercial products like toothpaste, and to promote presidential candidates like Dwight Eisenhower?

  • How did TV coverage of politics affect the two parties?

  • How did TV affect the history of knowledge?

S1 Episode 6: Cell Strain

Guiding Question: What did people know about viruses during the polio epidemic and how is that different from what do people know about viruses during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020?

Additional Questions:

  • How were politics and science tangled up during the quest for a vaccine for polio?

  • What are the rules of evidence in a scientific investigation and how are they different or the same as the rules of evidence in a historical investigation?

  • Under what conditions do people doubt scientific findings?

  • How did people learn about polio then, and how is it different from how you learn about coronavirus now?

S1 Episode 7: The Computermen

Guiding Question: Is “data” the same as “facts” or more like “numbers” or something else entirely?

Additional Questions:

  • How did the mainframe computer affect the history of knowledge?

  • Why was the Johnson Administration’s proposal for a National Data Center defeated?

  • What rules about data do you wish the National Data Center made?

S1 Episode 8: She Said, She Said

Guiding Question: Is it possible to know something about an experience you haven't had?

Additional Questions:

  • What is radical feminism? What makes it “radical”?

  • What did radical feminists mean by “the personal is political”?

  • What are the rules for using personal testimony as evidence?

  • What was at stake in Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz and why did the courts eventually drop the case?

  • What happened to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and 1980s?

  • What’s the relationship between the political battles over abortion and equal rights and the #MeToo movement?

S1 Episode 9: For the Birds

Guiding Question: Both historians and scientists observe change over time. What's different about how they do that?

Additional Questions:

  • What was Silent Spring and what effect did it have?

  • What are scientists learning about bird populations lately?

  • What evidence do scientists use to study bird populations?

  • How do patterns work as evidence?

  • Why has there been such a fierce political battle over the evidence of climate change?

  • Why did the sounds of birds constitute such powerful evidence for Rachel Carson?

S1 Episode 10: Tomorrowland

Episode Guiding Question: Simulating something is one way to know about it. What are the limits of that kind of knowledge?

Season Guiding Question: Over the course of this season, we've been tracing a change in the elemental unit of knowledge from mystery, to fact, to number, to data. Can you pinpoint moments in the stories we've told when those ways of knowing about the world were transitioning?

Additional Questions:

  • How did the rise of big data affect the history of knowledge?

  • Is predicting the future more important than studying the past?

  • Why does life in the twenty-first century feel so uncertain to so many people, even before the COVID-19 pandemic?