THE DANGER OF LOOKING AT HISTORY THROUGH A CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LENS, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia’s latest video:

At Commentary, Daniella J. Greenbaum lists one antidote, in a post titled “How to Think About the Past:”

Mark Carnes, professor of history at Barnard and Columbia, and author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard, 2014) is that glimmer. In the 90s, he created a history seminar called Reacting to the Past which thoroughly and successfully separates the solipsistic focus of and on students from the material they are ostensibly studying.

In a Reacting seminar, students must leave the totality of their identities at the classroom door. They are assigned a role within a specific plot point of history, and all their behavior—oral presentations, papers, etc.—must be exercised through the lens of that given role. If the year is 1600, the American Revolution has not occurred. Its leaders have not been born, its literature unwritten. If students want to utilize the ideas and values it popularized in order to argue for a different cause, they must be able to root them in an earlier, different period of history. They cannot use concepts or writings (or new terms) that had not yet been conceived before or during the time period into which they’ve been dropped. What a student believes, or thinks he/she believes, is irrelevant; what matters is only their ability to best represent and argue the position and identity that they’ve been handed.

It seems like an excellent workaround to the dead-end that is leftist academia’s Black Armband History.