HIST 11/12 Religion and World Politics

Duration: 1 Trimester

Honors Option Available

Grades: 11/12

Required Course

Essential Question:  

How does the relationship between religion and politics affect peoples’ lives?

This course introduces major religions and how those religions affect world politics.  It is accepted wisdom that religion is resurgent and matters, but exactly what this entails and precisely how religion matters is less understood.  This class will present a variety of links between religion and politics:  transnational religious ties; the rise and potential demise of secularization and secularism; and, the role of religion in shaping state-society relations including democratization and human rights.  We will concentrate on the three Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) for the first half of the course.  

The second half of the course will concentrate on the specific manifestations of religiosity and state management of religion among Asia’s pivotal powers, concentrating on Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism. We will also examine the influence of religion on foreign policy and particularly the United States freedom of religion agenda; and, the question of whether religion is part of the problem or part of the solution when it comes to violent conflict and broader forms of disagreement such as resentment between civilizations. 

Over the trimester this course we will cover all the above links between religion and politics.  We will also examine and compare Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism. Religion’s current relevance cannot be ignored, particularly when surveying the geopolitical conflicts, often fueled by religion, dominating headlines today. History is more than a mere recollection of the past. It’s a tool with which we may better understand the present. 

We will concentrate on the following objectives:

• How to read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

• How to delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning and well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

• How to use technology, including the internet, to produce and publish writing and to collaborate with others.

CCSS Addressed:

• 11-12.RH.2:  Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among key details and ideas.

• 11-12.RH.9:  Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or an event, noting discrepancies among sources.

• 11-12.WHST.4:  Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Honors option: 

The Honors Project requires that you select a current global conflict involving religion and government and follow its development over the course of this trimester. Your ultimate goal is to apply the Essential Question to the conflict you select. In order to do this, you must meet with the instructor, either before school, at lunch or after school to ensure that you are framing the question, and your responses to it, correctly.

Food and Culture

Duration: 1 Trimester

Honors Option Available

Elective

Essential Question:

How does food inform our culture?

Across time and across borders, humans have eaten not only for sustenance, but for pleasure, and food has helped shape the creation of societies and religions as well as nations and corporations. Eating together or eating similar cuisine binds families, cultures, and states together, while food taboos and distinctions draw distinctions between strangers. What we eat is not an incidental component of life, but an essential part of how it is structured; every meal we eat represents a confluence of power, culture, technology, and taste that can be traced back far into the past.

In this course, we will investigate the history of food from prehistory to the present day and beyond, as we consider examples from every corner of the world. Beginning with the science of food and taste, we will consider the origins of agriculture and the role of food in antiquity and religious life. We will explore the spread of crops and food practices across the oceans in the early modern world, and investigate the intimate and uncomfortable relationship between food and the global slave trade. 

We will look at the foods that immigrants brought with them to the United States and elsewhere, while probing the linkages between race and modern eating practices. We will look at the birth of nutrition as a way of thinking about food, and the scandals of food adulteration that helped shape how we eat today.   We will also create menus, shopping list budgets, and you will cook recipes using ingredients you are not used to eating.

We will concentrate on the following objectives:

• How to decipher and deconstruct a meal culturally. 

• How to explain the chain of circumstances, environments, and people through which the food you eat had to pass before it could arrive in your mouth.

• How to write a short cultural, ethnographic account of food that articulates the cultural relationship of food to human beings. 

• How to create a menu employing a different culture than your own and cook the menu.

CCSS Addressed:

• 11-12.RH.3: Evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain.

• 11-12.RST.9: Synthesize information from a range of sources (e.g. texts, experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of a process, phenomenon, or concept, resolving conflicting information when possible.

• 11-12.WHST.7: Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

Advisory is a class that meets weekly, directly after our school wide Community Meeting. Students are assigned to an advisor as they enroll and remain with the same cross-grade advisory group throughout their time in high school. Activities completed in Advisory help students work toward fulfilling the state's Personalized Education Plan requirement for graduation. Advisory also plays an important role in RHS culture by creating a safe and nurturing space for students to develop relationships in a group of cross-grade peers and a strong connection with an adult in the school. Advisory time is also used to process senior exhibition preparation, problem-solve school issues that may arise, and to make time in high school for fun.