Gaming led to my career as a history professor. When I was about ten, I discovered some of the first commercial board games, Gettysburgor Diplomacy. Hooked, I delved into the history behind such games and discovered a passion for delving deeper. After I began teaching, I thought I could share that passion with my students through historical simulations. My “sim” courses became among the most popular in the university.
I wrote...
Can You Beat Churchill? Teaching History Through Simulations
Can You Beat Churchill? is an essay and a guidebook about using historical simulations to immerse students in actual historical roles and learn for themselves what they can (or cannot) change about the past.
Carnes wrote this book about ten years ago as a reflection of his experiences in using role-immersion games—simulations—since the 1990s. It recounts the tremendous enthusiasm of students as a result. Perfect attendance, coming long before and staying long after classes. Student reflections on how much deeper their learning experiences were. It inspired me to write my book based on my use of simulations in the classroom.
In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students' competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo's trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy…
Another benefit of teaching through simulation is to show that history’s outcomes are not preordained. All of May’s works, but especially this one, stress the contingent nature of history. There was nothing inevitable about Germany’s victory over France in 1940. On the contrary, that victory was unlikely. May lays out a solid case that France ought to have won, and then takes care to dissect the circumstances that contributed to its defeat.
How did Hitler and his generals manage the swift conquest of France, considering that the French and their allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own scepticism about their chances? This title is a new interpretation of Germany's lightning attack that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in the spring of 1940. It studies the years leading up to those crucial weeks and suggests new ways to think about the decisions taken on both sides.
Neustadt and May wrote this book based on their seminars with government officials. Those seminars, and this book, taught two points. First, policy-makers rarely studied the background and context of the issues they were facing but instead were consumed with the need for swift decisions on immediate action. Second, those policy-makers nevertheless used history in making their decisions, nearly always using it simplistically and often incorrectly. The book is composed of a myriad of case studies. In each, the authors show how a better understanding of history might have led to better decisions.
"A convincing case that careful analysis of the history, issues, individuals, and institutions can lead to better decisions-in business as well as in government" (BusinessWeek).
Two noted professors offer easily remembered rules for using history effectively in day-to-day management of governmental and corporate affairs to avoid costly blunders. "An illuminating guide to the use and abuse of history in affairs of state" (Arthur Schlesinger).
This might seem an odd choice for my list at first glance. Lightsis a highly detailed, traditional sort of history. But the title is revealing. Most accounts of these fourteen years look back on the horrors of the Second World War and argue either that the Versailles Treaty, ending the first, was fatally flawed and made the second inevitable, or that the First World War itself failed to resolve the German question and it made the second inevitable. The strength of Steiner’s story is how much nations managed to accomplish—including but hardly limited to the now-derided League of Nations—despite the horrendous bloodletting of 1914-1918.
The peace treaties represented an almost impossible attempt to solve the problems caused by a murderous world war. In The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933, part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, Steiner challenges the common assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war. In a radically original way, this book characterizes the 1920s not as a frustrated prelude to a second global conflict but as a fascinating decade in its own right, when politicians and diplomats strove to re-assemble a viable European order. Steiner examines the efforts that…
Surely the rise of Hitler and the impact of global depression gave an air of inevitability about the holocaust to follow? In this successor volume, Steiner makes clear many other factors were in play that might have altered Europe’s fate. She details the West’s overriding fear of Soviet communism, the crucial role Mussolini played as termite to the tentative international order built in the 1920s, and the deep internal divisions that French leaders ultimately were unable to overcome, divisions that played their own role in strengthening British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to deal with Hitler at the Munich conference.
In this magisterial narrative, Zara Steiner traces the twisted road to war that began with Hitler's assumption of power in Germany. Covering a wide geographical canvas, from America to the Far East, Steiner provides an indispensable reassessment of the most disputed events of these tumultuous years.
Steiner underlines the far-reaching consequences of the Great Depression, which shifted the initiative in international affairs from those who upheld the status quo to those who were intent on destroying it. In Europe, the l930s were Hitler's years. He moved the major chess pieces on the board, forcing the others to respond. From the…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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