history
The College Prep history program engages students through an integrated approach that emphasizes interconnections between different regions of the world.
A three-year required sequence of courses—Asian Worlds, The Atlantic World, and The US and the World—is designed to deepen students’ understanding of history, strengthen their sophistication of thinking, and build the skills of writing, group work, public speaking, and independent research. By developing an understanding of systems of powerand oppression that shape our society, students are empowered to have agency in their own lives and affect positive change in their communities.
The department also offers a variety of optional electives for juniors and seniors. Through these courses, students learn how historians and social scientists use evidence, construct arguments, relate their findings to the work of other scholars, and examine differing historical and theoretical viewpoints. Students have opportunities to become scholars, reconstruct events, and build their own historical arguments.
required history courses
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Asian Worlds (9th grade)
Nearly half of the human population lives in the rapidly growing nations of Asia, shifting the world’s economic and political center of gravity eastward. Asian Worlds provides a thorough understanding of the historical forces that have shaped, and are continuing to shape, the major powers of Asia. This course explores the philosophical, religious, and political movements that have profoundly influenced the evolution of cultural identity in China and South Asia. Students learn how trade, diplomacy, and war facilitated the rapid spread of ideas from the Steppes of Central Asia to the shores of Japan. The course follows the arc of Asian history from the emergence of the first great empires up to the twenty-first century, culminating in the exploration of important contemporary topics like globalization, environmental degradation, women’s rights, economic development, and political protest. Students read primary sources, monographs, and scholarly articles while honing their analytical skills and growing as writers, thinkers, and collaborators. Throughout the course students are asked to reflect on how history intersects with their own lived identities and are challenged with the intellectual responsibility of using the past to understand the present. -
The Atlantic World (10th grade)
interactions among the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a period of history that has fundamentally shaped our modern world. The course’s broad geographic scope across a relatively restricted time period encourages students to make connections among histories that at first may seem isolated from one another. This transnational approach deepens students’ understanding of exploration and colonialism, the role of the environment in shaping history, the costs and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, the influences of religion and belief systems, and the interplay of Atlantic revolutions. Indigenous primary source materials are frequently used to highlight the limitations of more Eurocentric material. Students practice group collaboration, independent research, persuasive writing, public speaking, and advanced reading comprehension across centuries of writing styles. The capstone project is an independent research essay in which students design, research, write, and revise a robust paper that allows them to delve into a course topic of their own choosing. -
The US and the World (11th grade)
What is the United States of America? How do Americans define themselves, their nation, and its position on the global stage? How have those definitions changed over time? Continuing from the discussions of slavery and comparative revolutions in The Atlantic World, this final required course in the College Prep history sequence constructs a narrative of the American experiment with a focus on the twentieth century. This course explores core questions through historical and historiographical study. Students examine and analyze a wide range of primary sources, evaluate and challenge the arguments of historians, and explore and reinterpret pivotal events and issues. Some students might find themselves challenging the mythical origin stories of American creation by emphasizing histories that have long been marginalized, while others might create a documentary that highlights the Progressive response to immigration in the early twentieth century, or write a research paper that links the fears of the Cold War to the hopes of the Civil Rights Movement. In this course, students do not receive a narrative of US History, they build one.
I’ve been interested in law, justice, and government for a long time, but ConLaw reaffirmed all of that passion for me. I suddenly saw social justice issues through a new lens: the law and the Constitution."
History Electives
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Applied Studies: Social Transformations—Oakland (STOak)
STOak is a community-based experiential learning course that features a unique summer internship that focuses on social or environmental justice. STOak is hands-on and project-based, with a mix of structured course work, field trips, group discussions, and independent research. Students engage with Oakland’s past and present through a lens of indigenous history, social justice movements, and community development. Students research the social, political, and economic landscape of their individual focus topic while learning the professional conduct they will practice in their summer internships at community-based organizations.
During the internship, students are paired with mentors to learn how their organization operates and to support its mission. The program concludes in the fall when students share their experiences with one another and prepare a formal presentation for the College Prep community. Students emerge from STOak well versed in local history and current events, with concrete professional experience, tremendous leadership skills, and the confidence to understand how they can positively impact their community. -
Economics
Economics is an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Will a rise in oil prices affect your plans for a cross-country road trip this summer? Will a recession dampen your chances of getting a good job after college? This course offers an overview of both microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics topics include prices, taxation, and market structures while macroeconomics units consider large-scale economic phenomena, like unemployment, inflation, and international trade. The course concludes with a deep dive into the two major economic shocks of the twenty-first century, the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis. -
Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
Over the past year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has progressed at an exponential rate. What was once relegated to science fiction has become commonplace as our technology-reliant society integrates AI into daily life. This pursuit of innovation is not without ethical dilemmas. This course analyzes the ethical positions that have led to such extreme polarities in the public discourse about AI. After establishing a baseline in ethics, students focus on areas where this emerging technology is gaining traction by examining the justification for incorporating AI, the public responses to that process, and the material consequences of those choices. While the use of AI is certain to become a larger part of our lives, analyzing these applications gives students tools to consciously engage with this inescapable technology. -
History of Capitalism
appear so natural and inevitable, as if it lacked one? This course focuses on the historical emergence and evolution of capitalism as an economic structure, an ideology, and even as a particular type of rationality. Students explore the different ways that scholars have approached capitalism as an object of historical analysis over the last century. Topics include the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery, the turn towards ‘neoliberalism’ in the 1970s, and the ways in which capitalism and the climate crisis have altered how historians approach the study of humans and the planet. By the end of the course students gain an understanding of capitalism as an historically situated and contingent phenomenon and are well positioned to imagine and shape new futures in critical relationship to its boundaries. -
Race in Latin-American History
How has the meaning and the significance of race in Latin America evolved from the colonial era to the present? This course begins with a theoretical exploration of the very concept of race before moving on to efforts by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns to establish a specific racial regime to accompany colonialism and the response of the popular classes to those efforts. Students then examine how historical actors sought to define and redefine the meaning of race in the post-independence era. Major themes to be explored include the importance of race in the Spanish colonial project, the impact of the wars of independence on race relations, the relationship between race and national identity, the influence of international currents of thought, and the disjuncture between ideology and actual material conditions. -
US Constitutional Law
This course is an introduction to American constitutional law in historical and modern context, focusing primarily on the constitutional text and relevant Supreme Court decisions. From a framework of individual rights and civil liberties, topics include the rights of the accused, abortion, and free speech. The allocation of decision making authority among government institutions is explored, including the distribution of power across the branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments. The course culminates with a written and oral advocacy component in the form of a moot court case. Using materials adapted from an appellate lawsuit, students research and write an appellate brief and argue their case before a panel of practicing Bay Area attorneys.
the history program
on taking risks
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mens conscia recti
a mind aware of what is right