This course will cover the history of the United States with a particular focus on technology, culture, ideology, and how those forces intersect. We will also study how the law functions to both maintain government power and to defend individual rights. We will approach history chronologically, speeding through some periods to spend more time with particularly rich and difficult periods and issues: the Constitution, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and American society and politics since World War II. We will have a very brief textbook as a spine of the course, but mostly we will depend on original sources and scholarly articles.

This class will take a thematic, hands-on approach to studying US History. The overarching goal is to introduce history as a concept that changes each time it is told, and for students to learn how to apply critical thinking to various sources. The first themes we will focus on (predominantly through conversations, projects, essays, and debates) will be Democracy [what was democracy for the founders of the constitution and what is it now], the Quest for Equity [reviewing movements varying from the Anti-Tax movement of 1765 to the Temperance Movement to the Chicano Civil Rights of the 60s], and Immigration and Americanization [starting with who were the people that we took this land from]. This class is not going to follow a linear approach to US history in order to help students make connections to issues that are relevant in today’s world.

A small class for students new to the research process, Research Skills shows how to gather data, determine main ideas and supporting details, take notes, cite, translate information and create presentations. The course culminates with students’ individual presentations to the class.

An important part of each student’s junior year is the Junior Thesis and Project. The thesis is an opportunity for independent research, creative expression, and learning how to plan and execute a long-term project. Students pick a topic that interests them and spend much of the year researching and writing an ambitious paper about it. Additionally, students are asked to produce a creative piece to complement their academic work. Thesis topics have included the history and practice of ballet, the work of the controversial director Elia Kazan, the tradition and significance of Japanese tea ceremonies, and the history of the Middle East. Creative projects have ranged from staging original one-act plays to doing dance demonstrations to preparing a special meal for the entire school.

To understand where we are, we have to know where we came from, and much of American culture has European roots. This course will survey the intellectual and cultural heritage of Europe, starting with the Early Middle Ages and continuing through the present. It will draw from Art, Literature, Philosophy, Music and Religion to give students a fuller sense of the development of European ideology and culture. Although it will be a full-year survey, it will be divided into semesters, and students can take either semester by itself. The first will focus on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, including the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The Spring will begin with the French Revolution and will continue up to the present, addressing industrialization, romanticism, imperialism, and the principal social, intellectual, artistic and political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. (open to seniors)

In the wake of the financial crisis, and with battles heating up over deficits, the debt limit, regulation, tax rates, and the role of government in the economy, the discipline of Economics is at the heart of political debate. But too few people actually understand the theories underlying the arguments or even what the words people are using mean. This course will attempt to remedy that. We will start with a consideration of the great economists—Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, etc.—looking at their works both as ways of understanding how economies do work and how they should work. In other words, how should labor be organized and how should its fruits be distributed? Then we will look at the major theories and issues of contemporary economics, helping students understand such things as inflation, interest rates, regulation and deregulation, budget deficits, trade deficits, taxation, the stock market, currency trading, banking, savings rates, etc. The goal of the course is essentially twofold: 1) To consider the philosophical and ethical questions of political economics, and 2) To give students the intellectual tools they need to be economically informed citizens.

The UN has defined human rights as including the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. This course will be largely student-driven, after the first unit on the historical development of human rights, students will choose which current events we study. As is the case in many of my classes, this will be project-based and so students should be excited about participating in discussions and completing assignments that seek to create your own solutions to current various global crises. My goal is to push students to identify questions they have about the world and why it works the way it does, and then for you to answer your own questions by completing research. This is not a class where I am going to stand at the board and tell you what you need to know, rather, I will help create a framework for you to explore the current geopolitical climate.

What is culture? How does it evolve? How does our own cultural perspective influence the ways in which we understand other cultures? Is it possible to analyze culture without passing judgement? How can anthropology interact with cultural issues like racism and sexism? In this class we will work on answering these questions as we explore different theories of anthropology, read ethnographies (a description of a culture and its practices) as well as writing our own ethnographies of Buxton school culture, and examining social practices and media representations in our own cultures.