Teaching History with Video Games

Among the ways in which students encounter history today is through historical video games. This module aims to help teachers channel that engagement and use historical gaming as a lens to explore critical issues around gender and race that can illuminate the past in new ways. Tore Olsson, a historian of the modern United States, discusses his experiences teaching with Red Dead Redemption II, a popular historical video game set in a fictionalized America of 1899. He also offers a lesson plan that examines the question of women’s suffrage in the United States between 1850 and 1920 by interweaving content from Red Dead Redemption II with more traditional history pedagogy.

Read The Chronicle of Higher Education article about Olsson's teaching here.