The Grade 9 curriculum is a study of selected topics in world history. This class is a continuation of the Middle School world history curriculum, which, for new students, also stands on its own as a coherent history of the modern world. Topics focus on interregional unity and conflict, so that students gain an understanding of the roots of our contemporary global age—which, in turn, provides the context for the study of U.S. history in 10th grade.

The Grade 10 U.S. history curriculum is a survey of selected topics, from settlement through the 20th century. This course logically follows topics from Grade 9, including the rise of Europe, the emergence of global trade, and imperialism. The course gives students an opportunity for in-depth investigation of American political, social, cultural, and economic institutions, the historiography of American history, and America’s role in the world.

This challenging seniors-only course examines the field of economics through historical and contemporary lenses, providing students an opportunity to immerse themselves in the language and application of this ever-expanding subject. Enrolling in this course gives students access to modern economic outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Business Insider, the New York Times, and more, allowing for student inquiry into real-time economic analysis on a regular basis. Students learn multiple economic principles and theories relative to microeconomics, macroeconomics, and behavioral economics, and engage with the financial communities that surround Trevor in New York City. In addition to the academic material covered in this course, students are challenged in their understanding and representation of professionalism as they begin to consider life after Trevor Day School. To that extent this course to holds students to the highest academic, social, and behavioral expectations, which provides a true investment in themselves and their community for the long run. Finally, Advanced Economics requires students to create and submit culminating economic portfolios at the end of the year, which are evaluated and critiqued by members of the Trevor community and industry professionals.

This history course implores students to examine critical issues facing planet Earth—and encourages them to appreciate the wonder and whimsy of the world. The fall semester begins at the local level with a close study of the home environment, the community garden, and the design of New York City. We build toward larger-scale studies of the planet and its systems while using digital research tools to address novel questions.

This course prepares juniors and seniors for the rigors and opportunities of their college humanities classrooms. Classroom activities require creativity and enthusiasm; projects allow students to build, investigate, and present. Reading will be challenging, urgent, and varied—featuring short stories, memoirs, data sets, commentaries, and critical reviews. Students should expect to write weekly one-page responses, culminating in two research papers, and a “Student Voices project” that features a diversity of perspectives and personalities from around the city.

This college-level course is a rigorous, in-depth exploration of European history from the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. In this college-level course, students study the emergence of modern Europe through topics of religion, economic interaction, cultural and social developments, globalization and colonization, and governance. Students enrolling in this course must be able to craft sophisticated historical arguments, analyze primary sources, and make connections between concepts. This course is as demanding in its workload as it is rewarding in its intellectual endeavors.

This course examines the historical and philosophical foundations of democratic ideals and lived experience in the modern world. We explore the foundations of government and political engagement ignited by the Declaration of Independence and France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and how their legacies have shaped political agency in North America, Europe, and formerly colonized nations. We review the basics of informed civic participation and constitutional government as practiced and institutionalized in the United States and elsewhere; the rule and evolution of law and political parties; state power and popular resistance; the rights of individuals and communities; and the changing roles of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. We also explore in-depth case studies of the successes and failures of at least two other democratic nations, with the aim of broadening our concepts of citizenship and freedom beyond the American paradigm. Throughout the year, we unpack the complex social, economic, and cultural forces shaping current events and political disputes, while encouraging awareness of global citizenship. We contextualize and critique American ideas and institutions, consider how domestic and foreign policy are shaped by changing realities and visions of better futures. Our studies draw upon a range of primary and secondary source materials that help explain how we got to where we are today as a nation. Coursework demands extensive reading and writing, conceptual and presentation skills, as it encourages further curiosity and applied research.

This advanced course assumes a good general knowledge of American history—basic chronology, key themes, figures, and events. It is not simply a recapitulation of the 10th-grade U.S. History survey. Course content is selected to engage historical thinking regarding evidence, periodization, narrative, causation, correlation, context, and synthesis. We focus on in-depth analyses of specific historical figures, events, trends, and ideas, especially as they relate to one another over time. Readings are more substantial than in a regular history elective and include a range of secondary, primary, and digital sources—federalists and anti-federalists, abolitionists and nationalists, New Left and New Right; scholars and activists, such as Barbara Fields, Horatio Alger, Frederick Douglass, Jill Lepore, Abraham Lincoln, David Blight, Reinhold Niebuhr, W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Hofstadter, Tom Hayden, Milton Friedman, Antonin Scalia, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. Students are assessed on the quality of their written work, participation in discussions and group activities, and active demonstrations of curiosity and analytical engagement.

In this new course, designed with student input, we examine why history is important and why our world is so complicated from historical and social perspectives. This engaging and global history elective allows juniors and seniors to examine the challenges and successes that our modern world encounters relative to governance, foreign policy, conflict, sustainability, and economic systems that impact the world’s ever-growing needs and population. Additionally, students spend time learning about how we communicate with one another as individuals and how our everyday reality can be shaped by governments, media, and our own philosophies and beliefs.

As we unpack current and historical events, students gain an understanding of the importance of context, evidence, and research in historical events that prepare them for different areas of interest at Trevor and beyond. To that extent, students become experts in identifying misinformation, disinformation, and media bias, and construct new understandings of how we consume information in 2024. Students explore world history through five units that include Global Interactions and Conflict in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Changing Societies in the 21st Century, Politics and Geopolitics, The Power of Technology, and The Sustainable World Ahead. Additionally, students design, develop, and deploy a final unit that their classmates contribute toward as we strive to find personal meaning in history. Each of these units builds content through context and focuses on strengthening our skills as historians through student-led discussions, project-based learning opportunities, structured debates, a research paper, and more.

This course is ideal for students who are interested in learning more about both global and U.S. history from political, social, philosophical, and economic perspectives.

Beginning with the First Pan-African Congress and continuing to the present, this course addresses many of the intellectual and cultural movements in Africa, as well as evolving ideas about Africa and the experiences of people of African descent in other parts of the world. It explores the crucial role that Africa has played in the history, economics, and cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

The teaching of modern African history often begins with European intervention (the Berlin conference and the Scramble for Africa). Instead, this course focuses on early 20th-century Black and multiracial scholars and political leaders seeking to form a new international vision for the continent. Other topics include the Back to Africa movement, African spiritual influences in the New World, the emergence of Nollywood, and Afro-futurism. The class is taught primarily through writing, art, music, and film made by people of the African diaspora and features guest speakers.

From Broadway to Hip-hop, Stonewall to Black Lives Matter, New York City has been at the forefront of artistic and social movements for more than a century. Yet the city’s cultural importance is founded upon its unique position in the world economy and the ways its citizens created it and kept it there. In the past 400 years, New York City has grown from a Dutch trading outpost at the periphery of the global trading networks into one of the world’s preeminent cities—a center of commerce and art, achieved through millions of bustling lives.

As we trace the economic rise of New York City in the 19th and 20th centuries, we consider the ways its economic advantages have made the city a focal point of immigration. Immigrants and Black Americans moving North in the Great Migration sought a better life in New York’s factories, warehouses, and office buildings, and fought against discrimination and exclusion. Further, we read the stories of real New Yorkers as they negotiated their jobs, raised their families, and shaped their identities over time. Through exploring these stories, students witness how wars, business booms and busts, literary and music genres, and other trends and events originated in or reverberated between New York City and the rest of the world.

We examine the evolution of New York’s government over time, including conflicts in the 20th century over providing adequate transportation, housing, education, and public health, and how it nearly avoided bankruptcy in the 1970s. We look at contemporary city politics and uncover the roots of the often contentious relationship between City Hall and Albany. Finally, the course considers how these dynamic forces may shape our city in the future as we continue to respond to climate change, immigration and migration, and a shifting global economy. Students leave the course with a new appreciation for our city’s history, its people, and its future.

Since the creation of the motion picture in the 1860s, our world has become awash in images, and becoming a veritable flood of visual information by the 21st century. This course explores the connections between world events and the visual culture that surrounds and informs them. Tracing the coevolution between technology, human psychology, and media over the last 150 years, we’ll explore topics as varied as the Russian revolution and Eisenstein’s montage editing; African photography and cinema from the early independence era; Oliver Sacks’ research on human vision and the perception of time; and the poetic realism of Iranian films. The work is a mixture of reading and screening responses, essay writing, discussion, and creative projects.

Additionally, students build their digital humanities skills set through various tools that aim to develop their digital literacy in meaningful ways. We also explore the film review as a form of social commentary. Students should emerge from this class with a more nuanced understanding of the world and a sharpened ability to think about the visual media that constantly surround them.

This course examines the U.S. government and politics in their historical and contemporary contexts. In roughly equal proportions we explore the moral and intellectual foundations of American democracy suggested by the Declaration of Independence, as well as the forms and practices of government outlined by the U.S. Constitution. Among the topics considered are the rights and responsibilities of individuals and communities; questions of identity and privilege; the rule and evolution of law; partisanship and policy; state power and popular resistance; and the changing roles of Congress, the executive branch, and the courts. We work to unpack the complex historical, social, economic, and cultural forces that shape political events and disputes in the lead-up to the 2024 elections. Our studies draw upon a range of primary and secondary source materials that help explain how we got to where we are today as a nation. Students are expected to manage significant amounts of reading, writing, and discussion each cycle.

War-torn, oil-rich, religious, ancient, impenetrable… For many, the term “Middle East” conjures a kaleidoscope of stereotypes depicting a region that is impossible to govern or control, yet plays a critical role in this country’s security. This class aims to challenge these stereotypes by examining the political and social histories of Western Asia over the last 150 years. Focusing on the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, students probe the nature of power in the region from the fall of the once powerful Ottoman and Mughal empires to America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Throughout the class we ask: How have the interests of Great Britain and the United States shaped governments in the Middle East? What role does Islam play in politics? Why has establishing resilient democracies been so challenging? Topics include: women and gender in Islam, the partition of India, the creation of Israel, the discovery of oil and its impact on Saudi Arabia, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the Iranian Revolution, the Syrian Civil War, and the war in Afghanistan. Readings are drawn from primary sources, magazine articles, and the course textbook (Gelvin, James L. The Modern Middle East: A History).

This course provides an introduction to the history of communication methods and technologies, practices and theories—from the printing press to the Internet, NFTs, and 5G. It aims to equip students with an intellectual foundation for understanding the interdisciplinary traditions of cultural history, communications, and media studies by means of a historical examination of key events, paradigms, theorists, and some of the methodological approaches used by contemporary scholars in those fields.

We examine communication modes and technologies going back to the late classical period but move swiftly to the advent of the printing press, coffee shops, various kinds of early “journalism” and consumers of media, into the explosion of media types, standards, and technologies from the 18th to the early 21st century.

Topics include:

• Theories of human communication

• Interpersonal and strategic communication

• Mediated communication and social theory

• Communication technologies and cultures

• Persuasion, propaganda, and public opinion

• Journalism and democratic concepts of accountability

• Popular and elite cultures

• Globalization and media

• Mass media and political agency.

By examining key historical and cultural developments, students explore how communication constructs power and identity, influences politics and economics, and propels technological and social change. This interdisciplinary inquiry includes perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities, with course materials drawn from academic scholarship, public and practitioner reports, popular press articles, and a host of multimedia materials.