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The object of the history curriculum at Saint Ann’s is to ensure that no student leaves the school without understanding how cultures have changed over time and without learning how to write clear expository prose.
These objectives are much easier to state than to achieve, but defining them is also difficult. Culture, for example, is the anthropologist’s word for just about everything human, and that is how we understand it here. It includes technology, art, philosophy, and religion on a more or less equal basis with economy, kinship, and custom. Within the historical profession today, there is a general recognition that each culture item at a given time illuminates all others and that, unless the historian’s own philosophy assigns priorities, a change in any one of them can change all the others. One of the effects of living in a postmodern, media-saturated, consumer society is that young people are often unaware of our own shared history and cultural traditions.
The History Department has seven course years- fourth through tenth grades- in which to familiarize students with the five millennia of the western tradition, and its place in the wider world, in some kind of basic form. Our objective in fourth grade History and Geography is to nurture our students’ curiosity about the world and our place in it. Using maps and books and other resources from and about different parts of the world students begin to understand some of the dynamic changes that occurred when people from different parts of the world came into contact with one another. The second half of 4th grade history provides a broad introduction to the first Americans, pre-colonial American history and the making of America’s colonies. Our goal is to cultivate a genuine enthusiasm for the world through history.
The fifth grade course is American history: from the origins of our republic to 1865 to the end of the Cold War. We use a narrative style text as the basis of the course. We emphasize chronological development and cause and effect relationships, and we help students to learn new study habits, especially note taking and the art of organizing an essay-type answer. By the end of this year students should be able to evaluate and record important historical dates from lectures or texts and to analyze the information in a well-organized essay. These children read well or the project would be impossible. The course tends to leave the fifth grade student with a sense of some problems and personalities in American history, and an array of interesting and important facts and arguments within a chronological context.
Sixth grade history entails the study of ancient civilizations. To this end, we examine the transitions of early human nomadic and hunting and gathering societies, early settled agriculture and urban civilizations. We furthermore examine the development of culture, and the political, social, economic and religious structures in ancient civilizations. Our study of specific civilizations covers, in varying proportion, Sumer, Egypt, India, China, Greece and the early Roman Republic.
7th grade history is a demanding, topic-driven study of Western Civilization that begins with an in depth study of Rome and ends at the watershed year 1492. In addition to the textbook, we read numerous primary sources to explore contrasting perspectives on the events covered by our travels: the rise and fall of Rome, spread of Christianity, the rise of Islam, and the evolution of feudal Europe. We discuss, debate, and act things out to bring the material to life and to connect it to issues today. Above all, the course stresses writing in a variety of forms, from in-class essays to formal analytical papers to research, in order to strengthen the skills at the heart of this course.
In the eighth grade, we move from the Renaissance to the cusp of the French Revolution. Students will study more world history than in seventh grade, but our emphasis remains on the West and the impact of its encounters with other peoples and cultures. The course traces interwoven intellectual, political, economic, even biological themes- from plagues, to religious upheavals, to the development of print, the modern nation-state, global capitalism, the scientific method, political liberalism, and human rights. Research will be a point of emphasis throughout the year, and students are guided through a major project during the second semester.
Ninth grade history expands to be called World History, and is concerned with key social processes that historians associate with the making of the modern world. It tells the story of major events, ideas, and movements that have given shape to the modern world community as it exists today. It asks analytical questions of global significance, such as: how did the different regions of the world come into contact so that almost every part of the world today is tied into global political, economic, and social systems? Why are some regions of the world more powerful than others, both politically and economically? The course provides a framework to support further, more specific studies in grades 10 through 12.
In the tenth grade, students return to a general survey of American history. Starting with the colonial era, we examine various social, economic, cultural, and political events in order to gain an understanding of the tensions and issues that have shaped the United States in the past four hundred years. The history of the American Republic is our main concern and we examine it, warts and all, including the creation of the republic, the struggles over slavery and federal vs. state power, the rise of the U.S. as an industrial power, the role of the U.S. in world affairs, and the global place of the U.S. in the 20th century. Students will use a variety of primary and secondary sources throughout the course.
The elective offerings for juniors and seniors consist of: 1) sophisticated or thematic reviews of material covered in previous courses; 2) surveys of the histories of cultures more or less completely non-western; 3) introductory courses in various related disciplines. The electives for 2007-2008 are: American Government and Politics; Art History From the Caves to Corporations; Children of Egypt; The Cold War and Asia;
History of the American South; History of the City of New York From Six Perspectives; Mass Culture and American History; Modernism: Impressionism to the Internet; World Historiography: A Course in Reading Good History Books; The World of the Vikings; Women and American History.
Electives offered in other years include: America Since 1945; American Constitutional Law; Ancient Rome: Society and Empire; The Bible & The Western Tradition; Media and Politics in Twentieth Century America; Medieval History Through Literature; Revolutions; Russia, China, and India: Eurasian Giants; The Trojan War in the Western Tradition; The Twelfth Century Renaissance; World History: 19th & 20th Centuries.
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