World History 9 Full Year (Two Semesters) Prerequisites: None
Text: Foner, Eric, Kathleen Duval, and Lisa McGirr. Give Me Liberty! Brief 7th High School Edition (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2023) Electives As juniors and seniors, students select from a variety of one-semester electives in history and social studies. African American History One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None This course provides an overview of African American history and culture. Topics include major events, persons, and issues spanning the period from African heritage to contemporary times. This course will look at an often overlooked, yet incredibly important, portion of American history. In the early weeks of the course, we will examine early facts and concepts that center around African tribes and the years of African Americans’ enslavement in America. The course will, however, primarily focus on the cultural strides, joy, as well as continuing struggles of African Americans. Although the history of African Americans is one of struggle and almost constant adversity, it is also one of strength and perseverance. Despite the challenges, African Americans lived, loved, formed enduring communities, and created a unique culture. Since their involuntary arrival on the shores of North America during the early seventeenth century, Africans and their descendants confronted adversity by means of individual and collective action in numerous ways. The course explores these dimensions of the African American experience, and in so doing, highlights the multifaceted ways they made their own history while simultaneously shaping and contributing to the history of the United States.
In World History 9, students not only learn history, they learn to become historians themselves. Students learn to approach history as a jigsaw puzzle -- meaning can be constructed by identifying the individual parts and framing the boundaries. Students will use a variety of thinking tools and routines, such as considering causation, perspective, evidence, and argumentation. The course begins with an examination of the universe and world in which humans developed, then investigates the origins of society. Following that, the course looks at the first cities and empires, then the interregional webs that connected societies together. Finally, the course examines the process of globalization and its effects on the world. This course adopts a multi- perspective, multi-geographical approach to history. Students will examine primary and secondary sources, participate in activities and simulations, and craft historical arguments and counter-arguments. This is not a course in memorizing dates and names! Text: The OER Project’s World History Project: Origins to the Present
United States History 10 Full Year (Two Semesters) Prerequisites: World History 9 or equivalent
In this course, students consider the nature of the American experiment and exceptionalism by exploring the forces, themes, and conflicts of United States history and government from the geographic and demographic origins of North America to the Cold War of the twentieth century. The course will establish a connection between the history of the United States and its civic principles. We will study the historical, institutional, and political developments that influence our modern system, especially representative democracy, and the role of issues that shape public policy. Students will also engage with the Constitution to better understand the foundation, structure, and functions of our governmental system in the hopes of developing a civic identity. Students will put this knowledge to work by participating in a six-week-long simulation that will ask them to respond to an issue using the functions and structures of government to come up with a solution as a class. While utilizing a chronological framework, the human story – the interaction of individuals of all national origins, at all levels of society – will be studied. This examination includes close reading of source materials, analysis of landmark cases, artifact analysis, debates, point-of- view exercises, topical projects, and essay writing. This course serves as the ARP requirement for tenth grade. For more information on the Academic Research Program, see page 59.
History: 19th Century Europe One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None
The “Long Nineteenth Century” in Europe presides over a major shift in politics, economics, culture, and society between the French Revolution (1789) and World War I (1914). Topics in this course will include the emergence of new forms of identity, such as national, class, or gender, and their influence upon social change, Napoleon’s impact upon Europe, the institution of Great Power politics, industrialization, the revolutions of 1848, Italian and German unification, the extension of European imperialism, and the convergence of tensions which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. These topics will be examined through primary sources and scholarly resources, both provided and acquired through student research. In addition, students in the course will participate in a semester-long simulation in which
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