Who's Who in the Infamous Watermelon Rebellion
The events described in episode 6 of the MapMaker Podcast feature quite a cast of characters. Although a few "big" names put in an appearance, most of the men involved were low-ranking, ordinary people without the means to commission a portrait let alone maintain a family archive. We know next to nothing, for example, about Johann Shulting or Onufrii Volkov other than the scant details in the documents.
Historians are not in the business of inventing the past. Relying on written evidence places constraints on what we can know and what we can say about how and why things happened. Would we understand the rebellion better if we could watch Admiral Mordvinov's facial expressions as he collected testimonies? What if we could see which men took meticulous care of their uniforms and which had crumbs in their beards?
What if there were a way to conjure those lost faces?
In a way, there is! We decided to use DALL·E 3 to produce portraits of each and every character in the story of the watermelon rebellion. [more about prompts]
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