Mark Carnes

Mark Christopher Carnes is an American historian and educator known for founding the Reacting to the Past pedagogy.

After earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, he joined Barnard College, where he has been a professor of History and chaired the history department from 1992 to 1995. In 1989, he and John A. Garraty became co-editors of the ''American National Biography'' (1999). As that work concluded, he developed Reacting to the Past, an interactive pedagogy in which students engage in complex role-playing games informed by historical texts. He helped refine the methodology and worked as the founding Executive Director of the Reacting Consortium, a nonprofit that oversees its development.

Early life and education

Carnes was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1950. His father worked for J.C. Penney. He studied piano at the Eastman School of Music. At Newburgh Free Academy, he met Mary Elin Korchinsky, his partner and collaborator. They graduated in 1969 and married in 1976.

Carnes earned a B.A. in history in 1974. He then directed the Orange County Nutrition Program for the Elderly before enrolling in Columbia University's history program in 1976. In 1980, he was appointed Orange County Historian and became a visiting assistant professor of history at Vassar College in 1981. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1982.

Career

By the late 1990s, Carnes developed simulations to enhance engagement in his first-year seminar on great texts, which evolved into month-long games set in historical contexts such as Athens after the Peloponnesian War, Ming China, Puritan Boston, revolutionary France, and pre-independence India. This led to the development of Reacting to the Past.

In 2013, Carnes was named the first executive director of the Reacting Consortium. He stepped down in 2022.

In 1991, he succeeded Kenneth Jackson as executive secretary of the Society of American Historians (SAH). He became general editor of ''Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies'' (1995). He also edited ''Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books'' (2002). He resigned as executive secretary in 2009 but remained on the SAH Board.

Works

Early in his career, Carnes worked on editing projects, including ''The Compensations of War: The Diary of an Ambulance Driver during the Great War'' (1983) and ''Dictionary of American Biography'', Supplements 8-9 (1988), co-edited with John Garraty. His first book, ''Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America'' (1989), argued that middle-class men, responding to the feminization of religion and women's predominant role in childrearing, sought refuge in fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons and Odd Fellows. These groups fostered a secret, male-exclusive culture through elaborate initiatory rituals that functioned as an alternative form of religion and family structure. He also co-edited ''Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America'' (1990) with Clyde Griffen, an early work in the field of men's history.

In 1989, the American Council of Learned Societies selected Garraty and Carnes to develop the ''American National Biography'' as a successor to the ''Dictionary of American Biography''. Published in 1999, the 24-volume work contained 17,400 entries totaling 20 million words. ''The Times of London'' remarked, "Not since putting a man on the Moon has an American organisation undertaken such an ambitious logistical project." The ''American National Biography'' was released in both print and online formats, winning the R.R. Hawkins Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work from the Association of American Publishers (1999) and the Waldo G. Leland Prize from the American Historical Association (2001).

Prior to this, in 2001, Carnes published ''Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other)''. In 2004, he succeeded Oscar Handlin as series editor of the ''Library of American Biography''.

Carnes's Reacting to the Past games have been published as six books. In ''Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College'' (2014), he argued that American colleges had long struggled to compete with subversive play worlds such as literary societies, fraternities, football culture, drinking, and video games, which absorbed students' energies. He contended that intellectualized role-playing games like Reacting to the Past effectively harnessed those motivational energies.

Selected publications

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References

Living people
1950 births
American historians
American academics
American writers
Barnard College faculty
Columbia University alumni
Harvard University alumni
Newburgh Free Academy alumni
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