David Moss teaches history in the present tense. On a blackboard in an Aldrich classroom, the professor scrawls, “The federal government is insolvent!” He sets the scene for the class, an unusual mix of Harvard undergraduates and MBAs. “I want you to imagine: You just fought in the American Revolution,” he says. “The federal government—which is part of what you fought to create—the federal government can’t pay you.”
You may have learned about this issues in an 11th-grade American history survey course. But it’s unlikely you learned about it or any other American history topic the way Moss teaches it in his History of American Democracy course.
“We’re looking at history as not just a series of things that happened, but as a series of things that are about to happen,” says Moss. That means considering the choices the individuals—real human beings, not the one-dimensional heroes or villains we commonly encounter in history textbooks—faced and the circumstances, public and private, that influenced their decisions
