By Catherine Brewster

While Commonwealth students are busy writing history research papers, throwing pots, and playing soccer, “current events” (as one mid-aughts elective was called) march on outside our walls. In December 2024, a student tells her classmates at announcements that the South Korean president has declared martial law. A month before that, after Donald Trump is elected, U.S. History teacher Melissa Glenn Haber and a group of students sit on the Commonwealth Avenue mall, eating lunch and talking about how to understand the results. After Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, Audrey Budding, a history teacher who served in the Foreign Service in 1980s Belgrade, gives a talk challenging Vladimir Putin’s claims about Ukrainian identity. In early November 2025, Diversity Day keynote speaker Evan Milligan, the named plaintiff in a voting-rights case in Alabama, patiently walks the whole school through the theory behind redistricting and the relationship between Supreme Court justices’ opinions and the presidents who have nominated them over the last fifty years. These are just a few of the voices Commonwealth students hear as they move through both our history curriculum and the history that happens to unfold during their time in high school. In turn, the teaching of history at Commonwealth has its own history. If anything unites the distinct, impassioned voices of these scholars and teachers, it’s a determination to help students learn to listen carefully to past voices: the primary sources they examine, from the first days of ninth grade through the research papers they write each year, culminating in U.S. History. As Barb Grant, now retired from decades of teaching tenth-grade Medieval World History, expressed it, “to think critically you have to know how to find out what you don’t know, be able to assess evidence, and know that not everyone is thinking like you with the same values.” Current Medieval History teacher Sonia Aparicio hopes the course gives students “enough nuance and conflicting sources to realize that societies are complicated and that many questions don’t have simple answers.” Writing assignments involve learning “to incorporate that complexity into their thinking and not cherry-pick evidence to create the argument or narrative that fits into a perfect little box with no tension or contradictions.” More succinctly, Audrey Budding cites a Buddhist saying: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Ninth Grade

Before he began his twenty-one years as Head of School, Bill Wharton was hired to teach Ancient History and Latin in 1985, a few years after Charles Merrill retired. I’d always assumed that Mr. Merrill ordained Ancient as the first history course Commonwealth students take; in fact, according to Bill, “he was more interested in modern history and languages, like Russian. But he had hired Seymour Alden, who was a great medievalist and got a following of kids who wanted Latin.” So ninth graders studied Greek, Roman, and medieval European history before embarking on Polly Chatfield’s tenth-grade Renaissance course.

Bill remembers Ancient History as good for “teaching kids how to encounter primary sources that were strange. For a lot of them, the material challenged their preconceptions about how the world and politics worked. In Archaic Greece, the tyrants were champions of the poor, and the creation of Athenian democracy was an accident, the result of aristocratic factions cultivating support to advance their own interests.” In Audrey Budding’s words, “for understanding how much of our current world is contingent, there’s nothing like ancient history.” “Whatever country you’re living in,” says Barb Grant, “a lot of cultural ideas go back to antiquity.”

For Audrey, starting with Ancient also works “to very quickly demonstrate to students that our knowledge of the past is a tiny fraction of what actually happened.” It’s an accident of climate and technology—papyrus survives well in deserts—that we have so many texts from Ptolemaic Egypt. In ancient cultures who made inscriptions on stone, if they happened to be the right shape to be used later in a wall, the text was preserved, but not if the stone was more useful as part of a floor: “that has nothing to do with the value of that text” for understanding the people who made it. Over the years, different teachers have curated sequences of texts that Don Conolly calls “particularly fun to do together.” From when he taught the course, one such set included “fragments of the sophists, excerpts of Thucydides, the law court speech ‘On the Murder of Eratosthenes’ (because of the insight it gives into Athenian women), and Medea.” Themes “bounce between these works: speech-making in democratic Athens, the erosion of traditional values, naked imperialism, Greek and parochial identity, and women’s status.”

The current version of Ancient History includes material on ancient China and northern India as well as Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin. To counter what Audrey calls the “if it’s Tuesday, this must be India” problem, she focuses, for instance, not on a whole set of law codes from different cultures but on a contrasting pair that students can dig into. At the same time, the new material on China means “you can ask questions you wouldn’t have thought of about Rome,” adding new ways to show how people in different cultures, ancient and modern, “take different things for granted.”

Tenth Grade

According to Bill, if Ancient History found a secure perch partly because Charles Merrill happened to hire a lot of classicists, Medieval World History began to take definite shape in the 1990s, when Head of School Judith Keenan, “a historian, started hiring historians.” It was time, she felt, for a less “Plato to NATO” curriculum, and Bill recalls “teachers pointing out that Europe was not where the most interesting things were happening between 500 and 1500.” A medieval history course with more non-Western material “seemed like a good idea to everyone, and then we found Barb Grant,” the perfect fit. She remembers being told, “We want a medieval course, but a world medieval course, particularly Africa and China.”

Medieval, for which Barb eventually wrote the textbook students used until this year, continues the campaign of displacing familiar, straightforward stories. Current teacher César Pérez makes a point of objecting when students use the word “medieval” itself to mean “barbaric, cruel, or relating to torture, noticing that people from ancient times, early modern times, and even contemporary times can and have been crueler and more creative when it comes to torture than medieval people.” Africa, often thought of and taught in postcolonial terms, hit an economic peak during the Middle Ages. Muslim jurists over centuries debated whether jihad meant military or internal, offensive or defensive, struggle; after September 11, 2001, Barb added an essay on some of those sources. “Buddhism is not a monolith,” wrote current teacher Sonia Aparicio after she spent a summer developing new readings on East Asia. The new course includes, in César’s words, “new literary texts such as a juicy selection of pre-Islamic poetry and passages from the Kitab al-Bukhalā’ (The Book of Misers), the satirical masterpiece written by the learned Al-Jahiz in the ninth century.”

Sonia cites some enchanting tales from Korea’s Silla period—“bodhisattvas, mountain gods, monks, spies, beautiful youths (hwarang) who travel around in groups making music and practicing swordsmanship”—that she sees partly as a counterweight to texts like the one she says is her favorite to teach, a section of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles. “He argues that human reason is limited, and thus—while reason might be useful in understanding many things—there are truths beyond the comprehension of our reason. While I’m sure some students probably like Aquinas, the most vocal ones are often the ones who didn’t enjoy the reading. If, by the end of class, I’ve gotten them to understand his argument enough that their position has changed to something like ‘He’s got a point, but I still don’t like it,’ then I feel like I’ve done my job.”

Spring brings research paper season for history students—trained as ninth graders to scour our local libraries for sources, then given less scaffolding and more freedom for their second such adventure. Looking ahead, they choose between eleventh-grade history courses: “standard” AP U.S. History, beginning with the founding of the colonies, and U.S. History Since 1865, “best for students who like to go deeper,” says the course catalog, “into issues of race, class, gender, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism.”

Eleventh Grade and Beyond

Melissa Glenn Haber ’87 was writing a book when Commonwealth suddenly needed a history teacher in 2008. Though she has taught U.S. History since then, she says she still thinks “like a novelist more than a historian. I want U.S. History students to engage with the tension between the radical heartfelt belief that all men are created equal and our economic realities—slavery, displacement of Native Americans.” She’s particularly struck by the ways in which “being forced to take a side moves people.” The eighteenth-century colonists who were upset with the British “kept getting pushback until they articulated a political philosophy that they did not believe until they were forced to justify it.” In the nineteenth century, a similar process led defenders of slavery to the point of calling it “an active good.”

Having taken Ancient History, she adds, means students have read some of “what the founders of the U.S. read” about the fall of the Roman Republic: “they thought of themselves as part of a continuous story.” Audrey Budding sees “unbroken lines” from Alexander the Great through thousands of years of artists depicting him and in English soldiers finding consolation in the Iliad in the trenches during World War I. Audrey, who majored in Greek in college, remembers being mesmerized as she listened to a professor reading Priam’s speech to Achilles.

In wanting students to get out of history “what I’d want them to feel at the most poignant moment of a novel,” Melissa has always had company in the department. Barb Grant recalls that “Charles Merrill thought we should have a course on modern China, so I read Jonathan Spence,” who “writes history that reads like literature.” In 20th- and 21st-century Chinese history, she sees “a Russian novel, 1950s Hindi cinema, all kinds of epic, idealism and corruption, and then a capitalist Communist state.” Many Hughes (now Hughes/Wharton) Grants for developing new courses followed: in various years, Commonwealth students in Barb’s time could take electives on Japan, India, and “six countries that are predominantly Muslim but had diverse and fairly lengthy histories before they became Islamic: Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.”

Juniors and seniors in U.S. History and a shifting array of electives are ready to be caught up in such sweeping narratives without being seduced into oversimplifying the forces at work within them. Teaching Modern European History, says Audrey, illustrates that “the problem with lessons from history is that people are always trying to apply the lesson from the last thing to the next thing. After World War II, you say, ‘Okay, appeasement is bad, so let’s fight the Vietnam War.’” And, she warns, the familiar phrase “ancient ethnic hatreds” is never an adequate explanation for violence. In her Empires and Nationalism course, students read one scholar’s analysis of what he calls “ethnic times,” in which “parts of your identity that have never been especially salient to you suddenly determine who lives and who dies.”

Citizens of 2026

Anyone hoping our history teachers will supply reassurance about “the moral arc of the universe” bending toward justice, or even practical advice about how to live through our historical moment, will have to look elsewhere. As a history teacher, Bill Wharton saw his job as challenging students’ expectations of “stories with good guys and bad guys and an inexorable advance toward the present, when we know everything.” Barb Grant, who marched on Washington in the 1960s even though she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, reflects that those formative years mean “the violence right now” isn’t that stunning to her; she’s puzzled that people seem more shocked by it “than by erosion of freedoms and deportations. I’m always comparing what’s happening here to what I know about India, China, the Middle East: after Tiananmen Square, Deng promised people economic prosperity if they would give up this stupid idea about democracy.”

All history can give us, Bill emphasizes, is perspective: as Audrey says, it “lets you look at patterns and ask what’s normal for the time and place.” Melissa adds that “the past allows you to say, okay, things are really not so fun right now; when would you rather have lived?” Bill, who taught some material on medieval Europe in earlier versions of Ancient History, remembers students who were “shocked by the notion that people accepted their lot and hoped for nothing better than avoiding being starved or brutalized.” He remembers one puzzled question: “Didn’t anyone think about the equivalent of getting into a good college?” César adds that one student this year “keeps asking me about how people identified back then in ethnic terms, which I love because we are so used to the current terms that we sometimes forget that Byzantines did not call themselves Byzantines, and that Indians called themselves Hindustani and many other terms.”

César, echoing Barb’s principle that too much attention to politics “flattens people out into just ideologies and theories,” prizes “texts that give us a glimpse into the daily lives or even the private lives of medieval people, like the letters of Heloise, the Lives of Eminent Monks compiled by Shi Huijiao during the sixth century, or the incredibly modern-sounding descriptions of city life” during the Song dynasty, the Record of the Splendors of the Capitol, written in 1235 by someone using the pseudonym “Codger who irrigates his own garden.” In her elective on Modern Islamic Societies, Barb included “great Turkish TV,” the ways in which “Hinduism affects Islam in Indonesia,” and an Al-Jazeera series called Witness that featured women truck drivers in Egypt and historic sites in Iran whose preservation was precluded by Western sanctions. Bill remembers a “tough” account of plague and civil war in Thucydides, an exploration of “what happened to people who were otherwise decent when the rug was pulled out from under them,” as well as The Aeneid, in which “each advance toward Rome involves some loss of humanity.” In Modern European History, Audrey’s students encounter John Lewis Gaddis’ thinking about historians’ work. In Audrey’s words, “When do you start the history of, say, Pearl Harbor? When the Japanese islands emerged from the sea is too early and when the planes took off is too late, but between those extremes, where you start the story makes a tremendous difference.”

Catherine Brewster has taught English at Commonwealth since 2000. This article originally appeared in the winter 2026 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

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