History

A shard of pottery inscribed with a drinking song; a creation myth; 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 Near East and Mediterranean Basin, concentrating on the period from the conquests of Alexander the Great through the formation of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christianity. Throughout the year, contact across cultural boundaries will be a major focus of our work. We will try to understand how different peoples (including Assyrians, Persians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans) perceived each other, and what factors led them towards cooperation or conflict. We will also explore the strategies that various empires used to establish and maintain their rule.

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

Starting in 2020-21 there will be two versions of the US History course. In both you will be able to apply the skills developed in Ancient and Medieval World History to questions that face us today: How should America resolve the tension between individual rights and the community? What roles should government and the free market play in the individual pursuit of happiness? How does the legacy of slavery continue to shape our country? How have the actions of individual women and men brought us closer to (or further from) the noble words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence?

In addition to the focus on primary texts (which range from sermons to court cases to advertisements to short stories to inaugural speeches to songs by Tom Lehrer), students evaluate often-competing scholarly articles to practice inserting themselves in the ongoing debates of how to understand the past—and how to use the past to understand the present.

AP US History

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; it can also be combined with the American Culture and Politics Since 1968 elective for those who’d like an introduction to the full sweep of our nation’s history.

US History since 1865

This course combines the second half of the AP US History class with the material of the American Culture and Politics since 1968 course. The course will give especially attention to the changing role of government in the face of three major changes: the growing capitalist economy, massive immigration, and the end of slavery with the 13th amendment. Throughout we will consider the way views of race and gender complicate the story. As with the AP version of the course, this new version will have a research paper in the spring and—with additional work—prepare students for the AP.

AP 

We examine major themes and events in European history from the late seventeenth century through the 1990s. The questions that drive our study include: What has defined “legitimate” political authority at different points in European history? How have economic and technological developments shaped political and social history? What accounts for the rise and fall of nationalism, fascism, communism, and other “isms”? When and why have European states fought each other, 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-level 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.

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. Open to 11s and 12s.