Prep School - History

Department Overview

The goal of the department is to build students' knowledge of the events, forces and trends that shape their world and their experience of society. Students are actively engaged in the learning process and provided with a broad range of resources, including some of the finest and most recent scholarly historical writing available. Through presentations, essays, and papers, students are encouraged to develop their expository and organizational skills; class discussions help students to hone their critical thinking and deepen their historiographical understanding.

The Curriculum

Students take history and/or social science courses every semester. Students in grades seven through ten are assigned to full-year courses. Juniors and seniors may choose from year-long or semester electives including an array of advanced placement courses. Every course includes research, writing, and the appropriate sequence of social studies skills. 

Grade 7 Ancient Civilizations: Using religion and human geography as over-arching themes, the course examines some of the ancient and pre-modern civilizations of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Students explore the connections among the different aspects of each civilization, its culture and religion, its social and political life and its relationship to its natural environment. The course also embodies a unit on civics, to help orient students in contemporary political processes and issues. The course will focus on helping students to develop the vocabulary and conceptual skills for talking about and comparing civilizations, on developing strong organization and note taking skills, and on producing polished written assignments and projects.

Grade 8 Global History 1300 - 1800: This period saw the dominance of great economic and cultural networks and empires in China, India and Western Asia. Towards the end of the period, the political powers behind those networks weakened, and Western Europe began on a trajectory of development which brought it eventually to surpass other powers, leading to a period of European world hegemony. The course investigates the cultures, societies and political systems of the great empires, and the connections of trade and cultural diffusion that linked them and spanned the pre-modern world. The course assesses the factors in Europe and in the wider world which enabled the rise of Western Europe to a hegemonic position in the world during the 19th century. The course emphasizes skill development in research, written and oral expression and analysis of primary and secondary sources. 

Grade 9 American History: A tightly focused thematic survey of U.S. History from the time of the 13 Colonies until the present. Students see the rise of the United States and Atlantic world, and look at some of the challenges to the world position of the U.S. in the 21st centuries. The course covers the development of U.S. political institutions and the challenges to those institutions as the nation grew domestically and in global reach. The course overlaps chronologically with the Grade 8 and grade 10 Global History sequence, so that students have the benefit of viewing events from a different, more national perspective. The course continues to emphasize research and writing skills, as well as the critical reading skills that enable students to understand the vantage points of different historians.

Grade 10 Global History 1800 to the Present : The course begins with an examination of the world economic system on the eve of the industrial revolution in Western Europe, viewing this phenomenon in the context of the world networks on which it rested. Students are familiarized with key terms in the political discourse of modern societies, such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism, nationalism, imperialism, and communism. The course looks at colonialism and its long term legacies and at movements of national liberation, examining how these played out in the context of the two World Wars and the Cold War. Trans-national and international institutions such as the E.U., ASEAN and the UN will be examined, as will the less institutionalized forces of globalization. The final units of the course will survey the re-emergence of Asian powers, notably Japan, India and China, as leading forces in the global networks of economics, politics and culture. The primary focus is on analyzing historical sources and developing an understanding of historiography, as well as expressing that understanding in written form. In the course of 10th grade, each student writes a major research paper.

Electives

Juniors and seniors may chose from a variety of seminar-style electives. Advanced Placement courses and the course offered through Tufts University are year-long courses and avaible by application only. The remainder of the electives are semester courses which vary each semester depending on student interest and teacher expertise. In addition to the list below, courses offered in the past included Sociology, Modern Middle East, Latin American Politics, Women's Studies, New York History, and Hitler and Nazism.