Sarah Balakrishnan loves a good true-crime story. That could explain why she became a historian.
History is story: People did things way back when, and then a whole train of other things happened. People were affected. Like detectives in those true-crime stories, historians track down the details of what took place and put the pieces together into a cohesive retelling.
That’s the core value of History Escape Room, an unusual and extremely popular class Balakrishnan taught in spring 2026. The idea for the class started when the history department’s undergraduate curriculum committee faced a problem.
“We had these wonderful students who were coming to their senior honors thesis,” says Balakrishnan, an assistant professor of history who specializes in sub-Saharan Africa, colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. But these students “had never really worked with primary sources before.” They had taken their classes and learned. They had written papers and grown. But when it came time to prepare a thesis using primary sources, “they were underprepared.”
They needed a methods course, she thought. Get students poking around in archives, reading original documents, finding transcripts, judging books and articles. Easy-peasy. But other committee members shook their heads. Tell students they need to take a methods course and they vanish. What sounds less exciting than a methods class?
“So I thought, why don’t we create a methods class that’s exciting?” Balakrishnan says. “I mean, historians are just detectives of the past.”
History Escape Room introduces students to the puzzle-solving methods of history by using the techniques of the puzzle-solving trend of escape rooms: You get information piecemeal and try to figure out how things fit together.
“They learn how to be detectives of the past,” Balakrishnan says, “but through the lens of solving real cases that hadn’t been solved,” or whose solutions raised questions of their validity.
This sent her and her current co-instructor, Ph.D. candidate Erica Neighbors, on the hunt for complex cases from the past, for which questions remained open. These would be the cases the class would study. The famous Sacco and Vanzetti case came up, as did the question of whether the FBI was involved in the death of Martin Luther King. Then one day Balakrishnan mentioned the course idea to history colleague John Martin, who had a story he had recently told to Mark Pinsky ’70, a journalist and author of true-crime books.
Martin had told Pinsky the story of a murder that occurred nearly a century ago in the Georgia house Martin grew up in. The rector of a church, Charles Lee, was murdered, and though an illiterate Black janitor was tried and convicted on hearsay evidence, much remained unclear.
Someone in the community had become fascinated with the case and had collected years’ worth of materials, which Martin delivered to Pinsky for a possible book or article. Pinsky got to work, and the files grew. Court documents, transcripts, contemporaneous news stories – that made a great addition to the class. Neighbors and a teaching assistant went to Pinsky’s house and spent two days digitizing his files, which is how each case is prepared.
In the class, students rank the cases on offer and are grouped so that every student works on one of the cases that most interested them. “This is a class,” Balakrishnan says, “that’s designed to be your obsession for the semester.”
Over the weeks of the term students are given the files bit by bit. “None of it is scholarly research,” Balakrishnan says. “It is all evidence from the past.” Pinsky’s case included court documents and transcripts and copies of newspaper stories that the original researcher had meticulously tracked down.
The students love the work and quickly build skills. “Many groups have found themselves at first turning to AI software to help them decrypt old handwriting,” Balakrishnan says, “but now many of them report being able to read that handwriting themselves.”
After a few weeks she sets them loose on books and movies about their cases, “but we give them a grounding in primary sources to develop their own opinion on the case before they look outside.”
Midway through the term, Pinsky visited the class to answer student questions about sources and theories. He also shared his questions about the case: “The two red flags for me,” Pinsky says, “are that number one, this guy was not lynched before he was tried.” Even more, the Black man was convicted by an all-white jury, “but the jury recommended mercy. And that just didn’t happen in a highly publicized case of a Black man convicted of killing a prominent white clergyman [in the South in the early twentieth century].
“My feeling was that something was happening behind the curtain,” Pinsky says.
The students had specific questions about characters involved: “It seems he had more of a footprint at the crime scene,” said senior Lillian Parker of another person on whom the crime could have been blamed. “He had more indicting evidence against him.”
Theories have emerged regarding local criminals that Lee had preached against and developers whom Lee had similarly criticized. Maybe the man convicted “was picked as a scapegoat,” suggests freshman Victoria D’Ulisse, “because we did read a couple different articles talking about how they believe he had some type of mental impairments.”
It goes on. Pinsky discusses his red flags but mostly leaves the students to come to their own conclusions – which, ultimately, turn out to be somewhat different from those he and his research partner have drawn. If the research yields a podcast, a series of articles, or a book, he says the interactions with the students will make an entire episode or chapter.
Above all, Balakrishnan is achieving her goal.
“I think it’s great exposure to the type of research I likely would never have done,” says Parker.
Says D’Ulisse, “It’s definitely been really helpful in terms of just basic skills that I do need for the rest of my time. Like I have already used the strategies that I’ve learned reading through so many case files in this class, to kind of tell ‘Is this important?’ This is the most unique class I’ve taken so far, by far. It’s very interesting to see just how many theories you can form off of so little information. Realizing that we were probably wrong so many times was actually really fun.”
Did the class become her obsession? “I do feel like I got kind of obsessed with the possibilities, just getting excited to see what was next in terms of evidence, even to the point where my friends would be like, ‘Wait, what did you learn this week? What do you think is happening?’”
What is happening is they’re becoming historians.