Students take history into their own hands

But the method is not for everybody. Some students crack under the pressure created by the intellectual warring that goes on in class. And not every professor is ready to surrender a position at the lectern, especially when it can mean learning the subject along with the students when games are based on periods outside the teacher's specialty.

"You're used to seeing students listening and taking notes; you'll squirm a little bit as a faculty member to see students passionately involved," Carnes says.

In some instances, that means students reduced to tears in or out of class. "There's tremendous tension and considerable stress over the outcome of the games," Carnes says. The pressure of public presentation is intimidating for some, but what really gets them is the attacking and back-stabbing that goes on as they mimic real politics.

"I'm into interactive learning, but I was not prepared for how into it people got," says Shira Silberg, a Barnard junior who took the course as a first-year student.

Indeed, the class experience is unusual enough that its students have been evaluated as part of a multiple-year study by a psychology professor at Barnard.

Professor Kirkpatrick of Trinity got a feeling for what the students go through when he came to the training conference in July. Acting as an Athenian, he made deals on Monday, then on Tuesday an ally turned on him and accused him of treason.

"I could feel what it's like to be ambushed or denounced," he says. "I'm an adult and have a way of distancing myself from the role I'm playing, but that might be more difficult for an 18-year-old. They come to college and within two weeks are being attacked in class by a fellow student. How do they not feel that as a personal attack?"

That potential for animosity is one reason Carnes feels strongly that a course should include three games and not just one, so students will end up allied with a former enemy.

Barnard will soon publish a series of "Reacting to the Past" textbooks, and efforts continue to share the method. Last month, three Barnard students traveled to Iowa to teach the games to professors at Loras College.

The approach can be adapted to other subjects, such as science and math, Carnes believes. To reenact the trial of Galileo, for example, students would need to draw on knowledge of subjects as diverse as optics, math, and theology.

• Democracy at the Threshold: Athens in 403 BC

• Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wan-Li Emperor: The Forbidden City in 1587

• The Trial of Anne Hutchinson: The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637

• Rousseau, Burke, and the Revolution in France, 1791

• Freud, Jung, and the Nature of the Unconscious

• Defining a Nation: Gandhi and the Fate of the Indian Subcontinent, 1945

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