Gaming the Past: Democracy and Dissent in the United States

Catalog description

It is 1637, and a woman’s life is in your hands: Do you vote to condemn Anne Hutchinson to exile—and likely death—simply for expressing her own religious beliefs and challenging the Puritan church? Or do you allow her to stay in Massachusetts, risking the destruction of the fragile young colony and the failure of its mission to be a “city on a hill” to the rest of the world? Now picture this: It is a century and half later, and you are now voting on whether to ratify the new Constitution of the United States. Will the proposed Constitution save the new nation from falling into anarchy, or is it an instrument of tyranny that threatens to destroy the freedoms that the revolutionaries fought so hard to defend? These are some of the dilemmas that the course will ask students to face as they engage in role-play simulations of events—such as the controversy over the religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson and the writing of the Constitution—based on the Reacting to the Past active-learning pedagogy developed by Mark Carnes at Barnard College. Students will be assigned roles representing the different contestants in these conflicts and asked to reenact the debates over them. To prepare for their roles, students will read relevant primary and secondary sources and write position papers expressing their character’s views. Students should be aware that the process of playing these historical roles and immersing themselves in an earlier time can be emotionally intense and even uncomfortable. To enter the world of the 17th and 18th centuries—one where people of European descent considered themselves more civilized than others, where women were viewed as subordinate to men, and where aristocrats saw themselves as superior to ordinary people—students should be prepared to engage in and express views that are alien and, indeed, at times aversive to them. The course thus aims to show…