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History simulations have been shown to promote student learning in classrooms throughout higher education. In an undergraduate course on the New Testament and early Christianity, we sought to foster student learning by having students participate in history simulations that involved the use of fictitious personas known as avatars. In this paper we describe the avatar activities in these simulations, and we examine the effects of our simulations on students’ abilities in “historical thinking”: that is, engaging in the interpretive practices that historians use to reconstruct the past. We argue that our avatar simulations helped our students build upon, refine, and deepen their abilities in historical thinking in small but perceptible ways. We end by noting the extent to which our findings align with research on the use of history simulations and by identifying ways to develop our project moving forward.

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This article examines howuscolonial officials understood and utilized the categories of superstition, fanaticism, and religion during the occupation of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. I adapt Jason Josephson-Storm’s model of the trinary to explore the colonial politics of these categories. I focus on ideas about Filipino supernatural charms, typically referred to asanting anting. Civil administrators like ethnologist Dean Worcester and officers of the Philippine Constabulary blamed these charms for superstitious credulity and fanatical resistance againstusrule. As such, beliefs, practices, and communities categorized as superstitious or fanatical were targeted strategically for reformation or elimination. I argue that ideas about superstition, religion, and fanaticism were key parts ofuswar and policy, often serving racial projects of governance. Pursuing this line of inquiry allows scholars to see the material stakes of the category of religion and its proximate others.

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