h i s t o r y . d e p a r t m e n t
c o u r s e . o f f e r i n g s

WORLD HISTORY: FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT (9th Grade)

This course covers the 19th and 20th centuries. Europe is the main actor in the 19th century, but with the Europeanization of much of the world in the 20th century, our focus becomes more global. Starting with the impact of the Enlightenment on politics and of the Industrial Revolution on economics and society, we study the “isms” that have dominated the modern world. Throughout the year, students work with primary sources to create both analytical and research-based essays.

AMERICAN HISTORY SURVEY (10th Grade)

This course covers American history, from Columbus to the present. Students learn about exploration and colonization, and about the important traditions brought from the old world to the new. The course encompasses the events that have shaped this American republic straight through to where we are today. A basic text, along with source documents, is used.

JUNIOR/SENIOR ELECTIVES

AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION: WAR THAT MADE THE NATION?

Why have there been over 60,000 books on the American Civil War? Is there any other single event in America’s history of such enduring and gripping fascination? “The great single event of our history,” wrote Robert Penn Warren, “it may, in fact, be said to be American history.” Is Warren right? This course is essentially an effort to find out. In an attempt to grasp the enormity of the Civil War and its aftermath, we will explore the causes, the course, the consequences, and the contested memories of this tragic, transforming event. We will investigate the various ways the crisis is remembered and represented in fiction, film, and art. Several broad themes will be pursued: the crisis of the union and disunion, the role of slavery at the heart of this drama, the experience of modern, total war for individuals and the nation, the challenges of Reconstruction, and the enduring resonance of the Civil War in present-day politics. We will read primary documents, personal memoirs, and the latest scholarship to reach our own conclusions and theories about this era. As part of our effort to understand in a direct, personal way, the war, its public memory, and its unique hold on the American imagination, during the second semester, we will make a 4 day field trip to key battlefields and historical sites, including Harper’s Ferry, Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg.
Texts may include: Kenneth Stampp, Causes of the Civil War, Drew G. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South, Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, E.L. Doctorow, The March, Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, Robert Penn Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic, and selections from James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, and David Blight, Race and Reunion.

AMERICA SINCE 1945

This course examines the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the United States during the years since the end of World War II. Topics covered include foreign policy issues such as the atomic bomb and the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War; political milestones such as Watergate, the Clinton administration, and the election of 2000; social developments such as suburbanization, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, feminism/women’s rights, and the rise of the New Right/neoconservatism; economic issues such as the War on Poverty and Reagonomics; cultural and intellectual trends such as the counterculture, the “me” generation, and other relevant topics through the present day. The course uses both primary and secondary sources, such as Promises to Keep: The United States Since 1945 (Boyer) and Major Problems in American History Since 1945 (Griffith). In addition, the course includes films and documentaries that relate to this time period, including The Atomic Café and Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. There is also a substantial independent research component, and students will complete several research projects throughout the year.

THE ANCIENT STATE

What were the earliest forms of social, political, and economic organization that were developed by the first human communities? What is the source of law? Does justice exist? How are we to understand human nature? How do people behave in groups? What segments and classes of society should have political power? What are the strengths and dangers of particular forms of government? The course will explore these timely questions by looking at theory and practice of institution-building in antiquity. Our main intellectual reference point will be the thought of the Greeks, from fragments of preSocratic philosophers to Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. Cicero may make an appearance, and we will hear from the Stoic proponents of Hellenistic kingship. We will read much of Herodotus, Thucydides, the Republic, and the Politics, sometimes with excruciating attention to specifics and detail. There will be lots of short papers, and at least two class trips to the Land of the Dead.

AT HOME AND ABROAD: WAR, EMPIRE, AND WESTERN VALUES IN HISTORY, LITERATURE AND ART OF THE LAST TWO CENTURIES

This course explores Western codes of individualism at home and abroad through case studies in middle-class ethics, war, and empire. Noting the ascendance of democratic institutions in the West, we will wonder how Europe and America have engendered the power and cultural confidence to make war, race for empire, feed the exchequer, and keep up with the Joneses. We will selectively consider the creativity and hubris that have written now-slaughterous, now-glorious chapters in the last two centuries.
We hope that reading literature, history, and art will provide insight into Western ways of assessing self and neighbor, of reading the world with binocular vision and culture-clad eyes. We’ll travel a landscape that includes Goya’s nightmares and Cézanne’s mountain, Grosz’s fat cats and Warhol’s soup cans. Our studies may include: France after Napoleon; the Belgian Congo; Edwardian India and Ireland; Fighting the First World War; Germany after Hitler; America and Vietnam.
Writers will be drawn from the following:
Stendhal; Camus; Joseph Conrad; V.S. Naipaul; Chinua Achebe; E.M. Forster; James Joyce; Salman Rushdie; Robert Graves; Virginia Woolf; W.G. Sebald; Kazuo Ishiguro; Tim O’Brien; Robert Olen Butler; Jamaica Kincaid; E.J. Hobsbawm; A. Hochschild; Claude Levi-Strauss; Charles Maier; Simon Schama. We will keep a companion art history text.

HISTORY OF CHINA

The past two centuries have been a turbulent period for China. This course takes a look at China with the aim of understanding the basic parameters of its history and culture, and learning about the enormous changes and challenges of the present. International relations, economic issues, religious developments, general cultural trends, internal politics, and ethnic relations are examined. The course surveys the Middle Kingdom’s entire history but emphasizes the early formative period and the last two centuries. Basic philosophies of antiquity, internal growth and development, the emergence of a syncretic Chinese religion, the country’s response to the West, and the series of convulsive periods of invasion, civil war, revolution, and waves of radical restructuring are addressed. Daily life in New China, including housing, education, employment, transportation, medicine, entertainment and food production and cuisine will be examined. A short unit on communities of Overseas Chinese will be included.
Books to be read include: Basic Writings of Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson (editor); Confucius: Analects, Great Learning & Doctrine of the Mean, James Legge (translator); The Death of Woman Wang, Jonathan D. Spence; Buddha, Karen Armstrong; Feng Shui; Sarah Rossbach; The Last Days of Old Beijing, Michael

HISTORY OF DISEASE

Held over by popular demand! Predating even the earliest hominids by millions of years, pathogens have been the constant companions of humanity and have, for better or worse, shaped our world in many different ways. In this course, we will examine the impact of disease states from prehistory to the present day, not only on medicine and technology, but on human society and history as a whole, using many of the tools at the disposal of the modern disease historian, including anthropology, palaeopathology, literature, historiography, biology, and epidemiology. We will focusing on some specific diseases – Leprosy, Plague (Y. pestis), Smallpox, Syphilis, Influenza, and HIV – but also the general human response to illness both physical and mental, and using sources ranging from primary sources like Thucydides, Guy de Chauliac, and Samuel Pepys to modern historical assessments to examination of physical remains and paleopathological studies. Readings will be copious and sometimes technical, while writing assignments will be frequent and commensurate with this level of study.

KING ARTHUR IN HISTORY AND MYTH

Was there a real King Arthur? Did he unite and rule a post-Roman British kingdom in the early medieval era? What about the Round Table? Lancelot and Guinevere? Do these stories have a basis in history, or are they the product of the medieval imagination? These are some of the questions examined in this course, as we will seek to locate both the historical basis for King Arthur, and the origins of the mythology that has grown around the legendary king and his court of Camelot. The stories of Arthur and the “Matter of Britain” became the most popular literature of the Middle Ages, and reveal much about the society that produced and enjoyed them. We will read a wide sample of Arthurian literature, beginning with the oldest Welsh poetry to mention figures from Arthur’s world, and continuing through the great blossoming of the medieval tradition from the 12th to the 15th centuries.
Texts will include The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, several Romances by Chretien de Troyes, the anonymous Death of King Arthur, Tristan by Gottried von Strassburg, as well as the great middle English works Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte D’Arthur. We will also, time permitting, look into the 19th-20th century revival of the Arthurian tradition, and examine why the stories of Arthur and his court became popular again, and why they have remained so in recent decades. Students can expect a good deal of reading and frequent papers, as well as the occasional movie night.

19th AND 20th CENTURY HISTORY OF (MOSTLY WESTERN) CULTURE

We focus on the turn of the last century, the rise of Modern Art, Modern Architecture, Modern Music, Modern Dance, Modern Fiction and Poetry, Modern Physics, Modern Philosophy, Modern Mathematics, Modern Biology, Modern Management, Modern Economics, and Socialist, Democratic and Totalitarian Politics, especially in the West, all in the years between 1860 and 1919. Several essays, readings in original sources, and a longer paper due in March.

TOTAL WAR AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

“It is well that war is so terrible -- we should grow too fond of it.” Robert E. Lee

The period from the Crimean War to the Potsdam Conference, a near century of warfare that began in Russia in 1853 and ended just after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, saw the formal emergence of the theory of “total war,” the idea that called for the recruiting/mobilization and targeting of civilian populations of combatant nations. In this class we will examine the political, economic and military details of the major conflicts of this era as well as the impact that this new way of warfare had on the societies of the countries that fought. We will also delve deeply into how war was experienced, portrayed and explained through writing, photography and film.
Sources will range from the classics (Carl Von Clausewitz, John Keegan, James McPherson, Martin Gilbert) to eyewitness accounts (US Grant, Ernst Junger, Vera Brittain, Curzio Malaparte, George Orwell, Eugene Sledge, Primo Levi, Vasilly Grossman) to newer historians (Drew Gilpin-Faust, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, Anthony Beevor). Papers, tests and, as the above shows, lots of reading will make up the work for this class.

UNDERSTANDING THE COLD WAR

In the 20th century, the political, economic, strategic, social and cultural orders were fundamentally altered in the realm of the Cold War. After a close examination of the ideological factors contributing to the Cold War, this course will pursue an understanding of a variety of other factors that influenced the new world order. In developing an understanding of the Cold War, we will not merely look at the polarization between the United States and the Soviet Union, but examine the global impact of the war. In this widened perspective, our study of the Cold War will likely include an examination of the development and build-up of atomic weaponry, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the U.S.’ relations with Cuba, the Communist scare in the U.S., the space race, liberation movements in Africa, political challenges in Latin America, and the war in Afghanistan.
In addition to a variety of secondary sources, we will read a number of primary sources. We will furthermore view a number of documentary and feature films related to the wars. Be prepared to write regular essays, take regular quizzes/tests, and to write one major research paper.