Each viewpoint is the same event told by a different witness. Notice what changes when you switch — and notice which voices the curriculum usually leaves out.
Your Ending
An interactive history lab. Three events. Many voices per event. Each voice tells you the same event — but the event you hear is not the same. You toggle. You listen. You notice what bends.
Most history is told through the eyes of the victor. That is not a moral indictment — it is a mechanical fact. The records the victor kept survived; the records the others kept were burned, suppressed, or never written down because writing was prohibited to them. This lab does not argue that the standard account is wrong. It argues that the standard account is incomplete, and that the methodology of repair is to seek the voices that were erased and listen to them on equal footing with the ones that survived.
Read the chips left to right and you traverse seventeen centuries — the late antique collapse, the first successful slave revolution, the nuclear age. Same methodology in every era.
The Victor's Story — fewer than three voices heard. The lab names what you just heard and tells you who you missed.
Multiple Sides — three or more voices heard, but no silenced ones. The lab points at the voices you still haven't asked for and explains why their absence is part of the lesson.
You Heard the Silence — at least one silenced voice heard. The lab connects the move to the methodology of Teaching the Teachers Section 4.20.3 — the Critical Question — and shows how the same five steps apply to history that apply to today's news.
Every viewpoint in the lab is grounded in primary or secondary source material. Where the source is contested, the lab says so. Where the voice was suppressed and we only have it through fragments, the lab says that too. Citations live in the Sources modal. The narrations are written in the voice of the witness — that is a pedagogical choice, not a claim to verbatim transcription.
Sibling to The Standing Question (College IX · PHIL 410). Same mechanics family — stage + ledger, the student is the apparatus, no scoring engine because there is no right answer. Filed under College V (DCV Humanities), Building 5. Section 4.5.10.
Built by Travis Jenkins (User Zero) with Claude. The instrument exists because history, taught as a singularity, gives the student a brittle scaffold the world will break in five minutes. The Multi-Perspective Lab is the inoculation.
OPA's master methodology — Section 4.20.3, Teaching the Teachers: From Event to Classroom — teaches five steps for turning current events into curriculum:
Step 2 — the Critical Question — says remove the names. This history lab inverts that move: it puts the names back, but it puts in every name, including the ones the official version left out. What you've just been practicing is Step 2 applied historically. Same method. Different domain.
If you can do this with the Fall of Rome, you can do it with the news event that broke this morning.
Saint Jerome, Letter 127 (410 CE), on the sack of Rome. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and Through the Eye of a Needle (2012). Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005). Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006). For the Berber and North African voices: Susan Raven, Rome in Africa (1993); Andy Merrills & Richard Miles, The Vandals (2010). Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418–584 (1980) for the Visigothic settlement angle.
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun (1995). John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946). Robert Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (2022) for Marshallese, Kazakh, and other downwinder voices. Jonathan Pollack, No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, and International Security (2011). Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (2014). The Marshall Islands viewpoint draws on the testimony archive maintained by the Marshallese Educational Initiative and the Bravo test documentation in For the Good of Mankind by Jack Niedenthal.
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938) — the foundational text. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (2004) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012). Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti (2015) on the women warriors of the revolution. Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007). For the Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman: Léon-François Hoffmann's debate with David Geggus, plus the oral tradition preserved through Haitian historians since the 19th century. For the indemnity: the New York Times investigation The Ransom (2022) and Marlene Daut's coverage in The Nation.
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past (1995) — the canonical text on whose voices the historical record erases and why. The lab's structure is shaped by Trouillot's argument that silences are produced at four moments: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of history.