Historians' Café
Honoré Daumier, Les Politiques de café, lithograph, 1864 (detail). National Gallery of Art.
Honoré Daumier, Les Politiques de café, lithograph, 1864 (detail). National Gallery of Art.
What would three historians from different schools of thought argue about over coffee? Students choose a question, define the historians’ positions, and ask AI to write their conversation. They then evaluate whether the characters reason from those positions or merely use the expected vocabulary.
Assign readings that represent the chosen approaches before asking students to judge them. Prepare a comparison between a methodological disagreement and a change of vocabulary.
Students submit their question, character descriptions, original dialogue, quoted evaluation with course references, and revised dialogue. Suggested adaptation: allow a well-supported evaluation that finds no caricature; students can explain which exchanges they would retain and why.
Choose an interpretive question. The fall of Rome, the causes of the French Revolution, or the persistence of colonialism can support different arguments. Ask students to explain why their question admits disagreement before they start.
Choose three approaches. Marxist, nationalist, history-from-below, cultural, postcolonial, environmental, and great-man approaches are possibilities. Connect each to a historian the class has read so students have something specific against which to judge the result.
Write the character descriptions by hand. For each historian, students explain what evidence matters, what they think history should explain, and what claim they would make about this question. These descriptions are part of the submitted work.
prompt to give students
I’m writing a dialogue between three historians who disagree about [YOUR QUESTION]. Each represents a different historiographical approach. The goal is to show how different methodological assumptions lead to different interpretations of the same evidence. Here are my three characters:
[PASTE YOUR CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS]
Write a 1000-word conversation in which all three historians debate this question at a café table. Each character should argue from their specific methodological position — not just assert conclusions, but challenge the assumptions behind the other characters’ arguments. Make them argue, not just take turns speaking.
The original task asks students to quote one line that represents an approach well and one that turns it into a caricature. They explain both judgments with reference to the historians they have read. A character can mention silencing or class conflict without making a convincing historical argument about either.
The next prompt addresses the problem they identified. Students might ask a character to explain how a particular economic change contributed to an event, or ask AI to question them about the character’s assumptions before trying again. They retain the evaluation and the revised dialogue.
Before class, students post their work and read two classmates’ dialogues. They arrive ready to discuss which arguments they found convincing and what evidence or assumptions made the difference.
Constructed example — invented dialogue about a hypothetical strike. “As a Marxist, I care about class” names a position without using it. “The wage cut and workers’ dependence on the employer help explain why bargaining became a strike” proposes a causal account that needs evidence.
Another character might ask how workers described the dispute themselves and whether that changes the explanation. Students should connect each move to a particular assigned historian. The labels alone cannot establish whether either character represents that historian fairly.
Grade the character descriptions, evaluation, and decisions made during revision. A fluent dialogue isn’t enough to show that the student understood its positions.
Approve the question before students spend time drafting. If their historians all agree, revisit the question and character descriptions.
AI characters often take turns speaking instead of answering each other. Ask students to locate an exchange in which one character has to respond to another’s evidence or objection. That is a more useful revision target than a request to make the conversation livelier.
Keep the dialogue formatted for reading. An unbroken block of text makes it difficult for classmates to follow who is arguing what.
This sketch is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. You're welcome to share and adapt it for noncommercial purposes, with credit, as long as you share your adaptation under the same license.
Image Honoré Daumier, Les Politiques de café, lithograph, 1864 (detail). National Gallery of Art. The image's own license applies to it, separately from the sketch.
Suggested citation
Fred Gibbs. "Historians' Café." AI Sketchbook, Amaranth, University of New Mexico, August 21, 2026. https://amaranth.unm.edu/ai-sketchbook/teaching/historians-cafe.html. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.