In Sarah Balakrishnan's course “History Escape Room,” students work through a true crime puzzle in an exercise designed to reflect the detective work of historical research. (Photo by John West/Trinity Communications)
Escape Into the Past with This Trinity History Class
In Sarah Balakrishnan’s class, history research looks a little different.
Balakrishnan, the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History, wanted students to approach the past the way historians do: by piecing together clues and building an explanation from the evidence.
The course, called “History Escape Room,” turns the study of the past into something closer to detective work. Instead of absorbing lectures and memorizing dates, students spend the semester trying to solve an unsolved historical mystery. Gathered in teams of five, they sift through clues, debate interpretations and uncover new evidence.
“They work all semester long to solve an unsolved historical mystery by receiving new evidence every week,” Balakrishnan said.
When Balakrishnan first created the course, she expected it would mainly attract first-years and sophomores wanting to dip their toes in a history class.
“Within 45 minutes of registration opening, the class was totally full, with seniors registering, which I didn’t expect,” Balakrishnan said.
She had envisioned the class as an introduction to historical methods. To accommodate demand, she opened a second section that students could join only after speaking directly with the instructors. The result was two distinct groups: one section mostly seniors, and the other mostly first-years. Balakrishnan taught the course with help from departmental graduate student Erica Neighbors.
Each team spent the semester investigating one of eight historical mysteries. The cases ranged widely across time periods and continents. One group examined newly released FBI files to investigate whether the agency may have had a role in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Others worked on a century‑old murder case in the Jim Crow South involving the killing of a white preacher on a Georgia coastal island.
For that case, students worked directly with Durham-based true crime novelist Mark Pinsky, who had spent years collecting documents related to the killing. During the original trial, a Black man in the town was accused, even though the jury doubted his guilt.
“The question was who did it, and why?” Balakrishnan said.
Students combed through the evidence Pinsky had gathered, searching for inconsistencies and new leads. When Pinsky later read the students’ final papers, he discovered something surprising.
“Pinsky believed he had amassed as much evidence as possible through his own research,” Balakrishnan said. “But when he read their final papers, he told me, ‘The students found evidence that I didn’t.’”
Other groups investigated topics like a wave of witchcraft accusations in colonial India, where women were subjected to brutal punishments during outbreaks of fear and suspicion.
While the mysteries differed, the goal of the course remained the same: to teach students how historians actually work.
“We’re detectives of the past,” Balakrishnan said. “You’re solving a mystery — but how? That’s what historians do.”
To immerse students in the process, Balakrishnan leaned fully into the investigative theme. Early in the semester, the class visited a real escape room as a team‑building activity, where their investigative teams were revealed.
By the end of the semester, each team produced a collaborative research paper presenting its conclusions. A panel of faculty judges from the History department read and evaluated the final submissions.
The result, Balakrishnan said, was a class students talked about long after they left the classroom.
“They were crazy about it,” she said. “This was the class they were telling their parents about.”
Underneath the excitement, she said, students were learning the fundamentals of historical research: how to evaluate sources, reconcile conflicting evidence and build an argument based on what they find.
“They learned how to find evidence, they learned how to analyze that evidence, and they learned how to write a paper,” Balakrishnan said. “They learned the 101 of history, but within the guise of solving a mystery.”
Balakrishnan plans to run the course again in the spring. By the time the semester ends, the mystery may be closer to solved, but the real lesson is how students got there. Historical research, Balakrishnan shows, works much like an escape room: The clues are scattered, the evidence can conflict and progress depends on teamwork and persistence.
