When hedge fund manager Seth Klarman thinks back to his days studying history as a kid in Baltimore, his eyes don’t exactly light up.
“It was rote memorization of dates, wars and facts, and it didn’t come alive,” says Klarman, 51, co-founder of Boston-based Baupost Group, a $12 billion hedge fund firm. “You couldn’t visualize the people or even the events and why they mattered so much.”
But history is a subject so near and dear to Klarman that he now puts a lot of time (and part of his wealth) into avidly supporting an educational group called Facing History and Ourselves, whose mission is to train middle school...