This summer's MAHG program offered an expanded course list, including several innovative electives. But one established core course broke new ground by testing an innovative teaching method.

In their course on The American Revolution, Professors John Moser and Rob McDonald used an historical simulation game to explore the issues at stake as American colonists met in provincial congresses to debate their options in the growing rift with Great Britain. Moser, who conceived the idea, said that "for years I'd been intrigued with the possibility of using this sort of simulation in class. But most of the designs I'd seen for such games were not appropriate at the college level, let alone a masters course. Then I found the 'Reacting to the Past' series, a project supported by a consortium of colleges, led by Barnard College in New York." As the project specifically aims to engage students with "classic texts in the history of ideas," it seemed ideally suited to a history curriculum like that of the MAHG program, which emphasizes the study of primary documents.

Moser was able to obtain a copy of a game on the French Revolution, as well as an early draft of a game on the American Revolution, and tested these in an Ashland University undergraduate course last fall. That course sought to compare the American and French Revolutions, exploring the overall question: "Why did the American Revolution result in the establishment of a liberal democracy, while the French Revolution ended in terror and dictatorship?" Moser explained. The Ashland undergraduates' enthusiastic engagement with this experiment encouraged Moser to try a modified version of the game with MAHG students.

During three days of the MAHG seminar, students simulated the political situation in New York City during 1775 and 1776, as the Provincial Congress met there to debate whether New Yorkers would declare independence from Great Britain. Students were divided into six factions and tasked to develop, through their reading of the assigned primary texts, an understanding of the interests, priorities, and arguments of their group. Then, as the game unfolded, students took on the roles of those debating or otherwise responding to particular political, military, social and economic questions of the day.

Three of the factions impersonated by student groups represented actual constituents of the Provincial Congress: Patriots (those urging independence), Loyalists, and Moderates. These factions dramatized the debate that occurred in the congress's deliberations. Moser found the MAHG students often waxed eloquent in their exposition of the competing arguments.

The other three factions—Laborers, Women, and Slaves—had no official voice in the proceedings of the Provincial Congress, yet were empowered by the game to act in certain ways that influenced the deliberations. The goals of these groups, and the need for the others to take them seriously, reflected the actual historical situation, Moser said. Participants in the Slave group, for example, discussed fleeing to the British forces after Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered them freedom if they took up arms against the colonists. This move would then influence the Patriots to consider counter-offers and Loyalists to warn that civil disorder would follow revolt. Laborers could simulate a mob to inject their demand, that, if they fought, they would be rewarded with some representation in the new democracy. Women debated whether to lend their moral support, and their influence over husbands and sons who might take up arms, to the cause of independence. Allowing these groups a role in the game illustrated the radical nature of the American Revolution, Moser said. "Once it began, it unleashed forces beyond those that were anticipated by the Patriots."

As gamemaster, Professor Moser simulated an atmosphere of crisis by injecting at each session of the game news of events unfolding outside the Provincial Congressósuch as movements of British forces or decisions of the Continental Congress. He had prepared a series of "New York Gazetteers," each issue to be distributed at the start of a new game session and to chronicle four months' worth of historical events since the last session. As in a game of timed chess, this gave urgency to the deliberations. Certain steps needed to be approved in timely fashion by the congress in order to avert British actions that would stifle the move toward independence.

Here the differences in the approaches of the graduate students and of the undergraduates who earlier played the game produced different results. While the undergraduates showed themselves less capable of developing "complicated or subtle" persuasive arguments, they "did a great job of figuring out strategies" to carry out their objectives in the congress. In contrast, the rhetorical sophistication of the older students created an opening for those playing the role of Loyalists to use delaying tactics. "They realized if they could just keep everyone talking they would win the game," Moser laughed. "So of course we had to wrap up the game with a discussion of why its outcome was different from the historical one." But this element in the simulation reinforced a lesson about the risky aspects of the revolutionary enterprise.

Most participants in this seminar responded positively to the game. It did not entirely replace the usual faculty-led discussions of Revolutionary documents, but it did shift more responsibility for digesting the primary material to students. "So many people came up to tell me afterwards that they'd never before felt so engaged with the sources" of history, Moser said. He was also impressed by "the sense of collegiality among students" during the seminar, as he saw them constantly discussing course material and game strategy during class breaks and mealtimes.

Moser has honed his interest in "unorthodox teaching techniques" through work with teachers in the MAHG program, many of them expert at active learning methods. He supervised the development of an extensive list of secondary school lesson plans in American history for the Department of Education's edsitement.org website, collaborating with high school teachers in writing many of these. In his own student years, he was a devoted player of board and computer war games; today he thinks about ways to adapt this love to the college classroom. He has designed a game he calls "Senate Baron" that simulates politics in the U.S. Senate during the New Deal era; this game will be published in 2010 in the journal Simulation and Gaming. In mid-October he attended a conference at Eastern Michigan University where he participated in a test-run of a game simulating the situation in India in 1945, on the verge of its independence. He's also pitching his own idea for a contribution to the "Reacting to the Past" series, this one set in Tokyo in 1940-41.