Interesting. Find me the book.
Can't. I found a lot of "education science" type literature. Including one really great teaching model: start in the present, isolate some important events, then sort of create one of those old Inspiration 6-style idea maps going backward in time. So midterm elections inspires discussions going back to last generation, maybe about Clinton, and then from Clinton you spin off to foreign policy or presidential scandals or the environment, and from there etc. It all seems relevant to students but it still takes you back hundreds of years by the time the semester's over. Basically this:
Yeah, this ain't it. This is remedial college social studies, and it presents history as a longitudinal "what did your parents think" problem. There's no attempt to, say, link Reagan's attitude against the Soviets to even Reagan's role as the mouthpiece of the HUAC - it's "what do you think of Reagan? Well, what did your parents think of LBJ? See? History!"