In this article, Professor Cohen describes a playful assignment from History 2220: Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Rather than just learn what happened, or explain it, students have to rerun the past, trying to change it. They form teams, assume personages, redirect their fleets and armies, and try to fight a famous war, this time differently. The goals are several: emotional engagement, attention to the power of details, a grasp of the complexity of the global, and a sense of the tensile strength of argument and of the stability or fragility both of events and of our explanations for them. Creativity meets serious discipline.
Students in Contrafactual Politics: History 2220 read Mattingly's classic, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, now dated, but wonderfully told. We have more modern materials too, to set the record right; there is a recent Spanish revision of the tale and a version by a military historian good on gunnery. Students have catalogues of every ship in either navy, with guns and tonnage, and even see lists of provisions, with estimates of vitamins and calories on hand to feed a sailor: wine and sardines and rice for Spaniards; beer and salt beef and biscuit for the English. Some tutorials then play Spain, with orders to refight the war with the same soldiers, sailors, ships, cannons, biscuit, wine, and oil, and this time win. Other tutorials are England, or play the strategic Dutch. Each tutorial subdivides into various soldiers, spies, diplomats and monarchs, and, in groups, huddles in the library over sixteenth-century maps in facsimile and modern charts of winds and tides.
Finally comes "War Day", a bit chaotic, but often heated: I once used a big map and assorted lego bits to move around but as the course has grown too big we have had to have committees offer schemes, scenarios, and devices, often diabolical. (This year one tutorial calculated carefully, on good medical grounds, that seven kilograms of white arsenic would have sufficed to poison the stewpots of an entire army of 32,000 Spaniards and devised a plan to spike the entire mess). I sometimes bring in a neutral prof as "God" but this year, lacking a tutorial of my own and thus neutral, I played the tactful Deity and ruled on victory. Goaded by ancient rivalries and the imagined smell of blood and powder, the students learn vast amounts about the policies, nature, and resources of the early modern state.
A larger lesson of contrafactual history is that it tests the robustness of both the past and of our explanations. If it proves hard to conquer England, then the victory was already in the cards. If, on the other hand, a heavy cold, a seasick admiral, or a moment's panic destroys a kingdom, then we learn that both the tale itself and the historians' explanations are more flimsy. The project has group work's usual problems of discipline and fairness, but the rivalries spark zeal and passion and the contest cements a tutorial's communal sense. Many of the papers are well researched, well written, and often ingeniously illustrated and presented. At the "war" itself, students often turn up in lace ruffs or gowns and, this year, one burst out in sixteenth-century song.
A larger lesson of contrafactual history is that it tests the robustness of both the past and of our explanations ... we learn that both the tale itself and the historians' explanations are more flimsy.
While the groups research, I hinge my lectures on related issues of religion, culture, statecraft, warfare and diplomacy. I also comment on the evolving historiography of the conflict and on the ways in which new techniques such as marine archeology have changed our understanding since 1959, when Mattingly's famous book emerged. I aim to inculcate a sense of scholarship as debate and of the simple hunt for facts as a device to bolster larger theories and interpretations.
The students submit joint projects, three or four partners compiling work together, as "King Philip," "The Duke of Parma," or whoever. They have to describe the share of each and all sign the statement. The paper receives a single, shared mark, worth 15% of the course grade. Moreover, on the final exam, conducted with open books, one question, handed out in advance, asks students to reflect on the serious lessons of their experience as participants in a contrafactual exercise. What does such a stretch of mind teach us about the nature of the past that really happened?
For more examples of innovative and effective assignments, such as Tom Cohen's Savelli Murder Project, Humanities faculty Robyn Gillam's Mysteries of Osiris assignment, and many others, visit the web site of the online journal: Positive Pedagogy: Successful and Innovative Strategies in Higher Education at <www.mcmaster.ca/cll/posped/index.htm>.