I'm sure you're aware that some people do in fact teach history this way. It's gotten more traction in the last 10 years. I think someone wrote a book.I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta. You'd get a lot more causality. Also a lot more controversy, which is why it isn't done.
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!"