Deerfield's Complete Course Catalog

This course examines major themes and episodes in the development of Near-Eastern, Mediterranean, and European societies from antiquity to the French Revolution. Using a diverse selection of historical and literary texts to highlight the tensions, ideas, and key events that have shaped our world, the course also provides students with a foundation of core skills, including source analysis, research methods, historical interpretation, and analytical writing. Topics include the wars, politics, and ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and the influence of religion, in particular Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on societies and cultures.

This course uses literature, along with a rich variety of historical sources including documents and films, to study cultural and political developments in Africa and Latin America . The course explores how the forces of conquest, colonization and commerce have shaped the lives of individuals and communities on these continents. We also focus on the process of upheaval and change associated with decolonization, independence and revolution in these regions. Along with being interdisciplinary, texts rely heavily upon indigenous voices and focus on a range of countries including Nigeria, Kenya, the Congo, South Africa, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil and Cuba. The course is designed to build each student’s foundation in key historical skills including active reading, argumentative writing and inquiry-based research.

This course serves both as an introduction for students who have never studied Asian history and as a means, for those with foundational background, to further explore the societies, politics and belief systems of India, China and the Middle East. While students focus primarily on one of the three regional civilizations each term, they also trace the complex web of commercial and cultural exchange paths that crossed Asia and stretched to Europe, Africa, and Oceania. Along the way, they inquire into the relationship between these early pathways and modern global ones. Secondary source texts provide scaffolding for the course, but we also read from primary spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Confucian Analects and the Qur’an, as well as from early travelogues, histories and manuals on ruling and warfare. Throughout the year, students develop and hone skills in active reading and viewing (of film and still images), discussion and debate, historical research, and the presentation of oral, multi-media and written arguments.

Where did everything come from? How did we get where we are now? Where do humans fit in? Where are things heading? These are questions that origin stories from different cultures have addressed for thousands of years. This course explores the modern scientific origin story of how the universe and life within it has grown more complex over the last 13.7 billion years. This tale, itself thousands of years in the making, has been woven together by a wide spectrum of scientists and historians. Together, students will engage powerful ideas and common themes across the entire time scale of history, from the Big Bang and creation of star systems to the emergence of the Earth’s first microorganisms and the recent rise of human societies. The course juggles huge objects such as galaxies with tiny ones such as atoms, while it examines both events that took a billionth of a second and stories that span billions of years. Because Big History relies upon content, concepts and texts drawn from many disciplines, students will need to carefully weigh how scholars develop and justify their claims about the past, and how, over time, new claims serve to refute or refine earlier ones. Students will also have the opportunity to create their own narratives, explanations and arguments in response to Big History’s essential questions.

This survey course charts the emergence of modern America through a study of its past. More than a purely political and chronological review, the course also examines social, economic and cultural aspects of our heritage. In addition to the basal textbook, the course uses many primary documents, interpretive secondary sources, guest lectures, and multimedia technology. Careful attention is given to the development of historical skills, from research and writing to the conceptualization of individual historical interpretations. This course is required of all juniors not enrolled in American Studies or Honors United States History.

A small continent, Europe has for centuries had an outsized impact on world affairs. Communism and fascism, Munich and Kosovo, total war and genocide, war-crimes tribunals and human-rights charters, neo-realism and neoliberalism, Beatlemania and punk rock, ’1968′ and ’1989′, ethnic cleansing and the Eurovision Song Contest, Georgie Best and Zizou — these are just a few of Europe’s contributions to the history of our age. This course examines the human experience of such episodes of political, social, and cultural upheaval and innovation in the twentieth century, focusing on the values that drove people to act, shaped and transformed institutions, guided state policy, and underpinned communities, families and individuals. Special attention will be given to the modernism of the Belle Epoque, the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Holocaust, Cold-War culture, 1968 and the revolt of the postwar generation, detente and the Second Cold War, the dissolution of the EastBloc, and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. We end with an examination of the challenges and opportunities facing Europeans in an age of globalization. Film, literature and memoir are used extensively to understand, interpret and evaluate the human experience of Europe’s twentieth century. The course stresses critical thinking and discussion skills, and activities include debates, roundtables, and simulations. Students will acquire a thorough and up-to-date grounding in research skills that will serve them well in college and beyond. (Note that this course covers roughly one-third of the syllabus for the AP exam in European History; interested students may choose to undertake additional, guided reading and attend occasional meetings in preparation for that exam.)