History

A camel driver’s complaint; Persian kingship inscriptions; Athenian court cases—how can historians tell us anything about the past from such insufficient sources?

By making you distrust the certainty with which textbooks lay out “facts,” Ancient History at Commonwealth provides an excellent introduction to the study of history. In this course, you will use primary sources to explore the history of the ancient world, concentrating on Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean basin, northern India, and China. Throughout the year, we will seek to understand how kings and emperors projected their power across vast distances and how people in each society made sense of their own lives and the world around them. Contact across cultural boundaries will be a major focus of our work, as we examine how different peoples perceived each other and what factors led them towards cooperation or conflict.

Instead of accepting the facts as presented in secondary sources, I could see for myself what really went on. Reading primary sources in history was a way to cut through the dry tone of a textbook and focus on how people actually felt and what they saw.

The medieval world was an interconnected one: Chinese emperors prized ostrich eggs from Africa; African and European kings wore silks from the East. In Medieval World History, we look at how ideas (and diseases) traveled freely on the Silk Road that tied East to West in a time of rich and diverse cultures when East, rather than West, ruled the world.

Primary sources allow us to look at the ways the cultures of China, the Muslim world (including Africa), and Europe viewed one another; how religions developed in response to other religions as well as political necessity; and how evolving technology and economic systems changed cultures. Though we have a textbook, created specifically for this course by a Commonwealth teacher, our main focus remains close reading and in-depth discussion of primary sources, including such classic works as Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; Dante, Inferno; Bocaccio, Decameron; the Malian epic Sundiata; and The Incoherence of the Incoherence by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd.

Our history curriculum, centered on the close reading of primary sources, made it easy for me to imagine the sorrow of a Greek poet’s lament in ancient history or a layperson’s yearning for nirvana in the Buddhist colophons we read in Medieval History.

AP

In this version of the course, students will trace the changing understanding of what it means to be “free” (and what role government might play in limiting or securing that freedom) from the founding of the colonies in the 17th century to the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. This version is best for students looking for a grounding of our current world in the debates at the founding Republic, with the fall semester focusing on the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th century, including the debates over slavery and how those shaped lingering attitudes long after the 13th Amendment.

AP 

This course, which also prepares students for the US AP, is based on the second half of the AP US History class, going deeper into each topic and ending in the 1990s. The course will give special attention to the changing role of government in the face of three major changes: the end of slavery with the 13th Amendment, the growing capitalist economy, and the Cold War. This version adds to the written primary sources of the standard version more films, cartoons, advertisements, and music and is best for students who like to go deeper into issues of race, class, gender, and ideology.

The twentieth-century world emerged from the ruins of empires. In this course, we will explore the ways in which imperial rule and its usually violent end have shaped nationalism and national conflict. We will examine the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, Yugoslavia from the state’s formation through the post-Yugoslav wars, the end of the British Raj and the trauma of Partition in India, and Iraq’s experience from the Ottomans through the present. The course will challenge students not only to understand the uniqueness of each country’s history but also to think conceptually and comparatively across cases. In most weeks, students will write a response paragraph on an assigned question. The class has no tests or longer writing assignments.

Hieroglyphs carved in stone or traced in bark-paper books;
pyramids aligned with the stars; an intricate calendar of intermeshing cycles; human sacrifice, royal bloodletting, a ballgame symbolizing the struggle between light and dark, life and death. These hallmarks of Maya civilization were in fact practiced throughout Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, a region stretching from central Mexico to Honduras. They will loom large as we examine the development of Olmec, Maya, and Aztec cities (among others), from the second millennium BCE to the conquest of Mexico in 1521, with a focus on the dazzling city-states of the lowland Maya during the Classic Period (c. 250-925 CE). We will necessarily engage with a variety of evidence, including material remains, works of art, and inscriptions–class time is largely devoted to viewing and analyzing slides of these monuments. We will also rely heavily on the K’iche’ epic Popol Vuh to reconstruct Maya religion. You will therefore use all the skills you have honed in your history and English classes (plus a little math), and learn about some of the techniques archeologists and anthropologists use to reconstruct the past, such as ceramic analysis and the ethnology of indigenous peoples. While there will be periodic quizzes on factual information, most written work will involve the analysis of specific buildings, artifacts, or texts. 

AP 

This class covers major themes and events in European history from the eighteenth century through the 1990s, and then jumps forward to the present to examine the war in Ukraine. Our central questions include: What has defined “legitimate” political authority at different points in European history? How have economic and technological developments shaped the lives of ordinary Europeans? What accounts for the rise and fall of nationalism, imperialism, fascism, and communism? When and why have European states fought each other, subjugated non-European peoples, or persecuted groups of their own citizens?

Primary sources provide the basis for class discussion and for most writing assignments. For instance, we use contemporary reactions to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to see how Enlightenment thinkers understood human suffering, and we draw on sources ranging from dissidents’ writings to secret police reports to analyze the revolutions of 1989. Our readings also include a college-level textbook and a variety of scholarly articles. After this class, you will enter college prepared for advanced electives in modern European history.

Studying recent history became relevant not only because it helped me make sense of the present, but also because it made me ask who had written what I was reading and how we can come to know what is true and what is not.

Our goal is to understand how communism has functioned as a social and political system. How did one-party regimes claiming Marxist ideals come to power in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and North Korea? How did these regimes transform the societies they governed while simultaneously constructing a new hierarchy of privilege? Why did they ultimately lose power in some countries but not in others?

After a brief introduction to Karl Marx and his thought, we explore the rise and fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. We pay special attention to Yugoslavia, analyzing how the complex interplay of communism and nationalism ultimately led to the state’s collapse. We then survey Maoism in China before turning to the catastrophic history of communist rule in Cambodia and North Korea. Our approach is both top-down (Why did leaders make the choices they did?) and bottom-up (How did ordinary people experience communist rule?).

Throughout the year, we will think and talk not only about each country’s unique experience but also about recurring dynamics (for instance, how regime policies led to mass famine in the USSR, China, and North Korea). We read a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs, government documents, and journalists’ writings.

This course will attempt to account for the dazzling multiplicity of American peoples, cultures, and stories, from the colonial era to the present. We will discuss the devastating impact of colonization on the indigenous peoples, the ideas that informed the urban planning and the administration of the new colonies, the struggles of the oppressed and the enslaved, the emergence of nation-states in the wake of the Independence movement, and the societies created by the clash of cultures and traditions. We will explore concepts like transculturation, hybridity, and syncretism and will read some of the texts that decisively influenced the new republics’ nation-building, such as Our America by José Martí, The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos, and Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire. We will explore culture as a site of agency and resistance for communities that have been traditionally marginalized or excluded from the national project. Last but not least, we will pay special attention to the complex history of the region’s interactions with the United States from the nineteenth century onwards.