History & Geography

About this course

Ninth grade is the first of the high school years and it is a full 180 lessons in 15 units of twelve, at about 50 minutes each. The first eight units cover the familiar ground at a new level. American history runs from Jamestown and the Pilgrims through the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, Lincoln, and Reconstruction, closing with a lesson on how the founding generation talked about Providence. World civilizations runs Mesopotamia through Egypt, Greece, and Rome to Byzantium, the Islamic caliphates, medieval Europe, the Crusades, and the Renaissance. Government covers the origins of American political thought, Congress, presidential power, Article III, federalism, civil liberties, the two-party system, and foreign policy. Economics is a genuine high school sequence: scarcity and opportunity cost, economic systems, supply and demand, market structures, consumer finance, labor markets, money and the Federal Reserve, GDP and business cycles, fiscal policy, and trade. Cultural studies takes up the Christian roots of Western civilization, the Enlightenment, postmodernism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, secularism, popular culture, globalization, and American exceptionalism.

The last seven units go deeper and add ground most surveys skip. American history returns to the Native nations before Jamestown, Roanoke, the Great Awakening, Hamilton against Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, the Missouri Compromise, the antebellum reform movements, the Gilded Age, and Ellis Island. World civilizations adds ancient China and the Mandate of Heaven, the Indus Valley, Charlemagne, the Mongol Empire, the West African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai with Mansa Musa and the libraries of Timbuktu, feudal Japan, and the Aztec and Inca. Advanced civics takes on natural law theory, constitutional interpretation, the administrative state, Supreme Court reform proposals, nullification and sanctuary cities, and a closing lesson comparing Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine, Reformed sphere sovereignty, the Anabaptist church-world distinction, and liberation theology, naming the characteristic failure of each.

A lesson is a thousand to fourteen hundred words of analytical prose with key terms in bold, primary sources quoted at length, a Scripture passage, and frequently a two-page essay assignment as the activity. The ten-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of each lesson grades itself; the essays do not, so those come back to you. You should know that the current events unit engages contemporary moral and policy questions head-on: artificial intelligence, climate science and climate policy, bioethics, racial justice, the persecuted church, and abortion after the Dobbs decision. That lesson lays out the biological facts, the competing definitions of personhood, and the historic Christian position, and it asks your student to argue the pro-life case in writing. The course assumes a reader ready for real argument and a willingness on your part to talk through what comes up.

What the course covers

• Jamestown through Reconstruction, including Providence in the founding
• Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium
• Medieval Europe, the Crusades, and the Renaissance
• China, the Indus Valley, the Mongols, West Africa, Japan, and the Americas
• Physical, human, and political geography and geopolitics
• Congress, the presidency, the courts, federalism, and civil liberties
• Natural law, constitutional interpretation, and the administrative state
• Microeconomics, macroeconomics, the Federal Reserve, and trade
• Worldview: the Enlightenment, postmodernism, secularism, and world religions
• Contemporary issues: AI, climate policy, bioethics, abortion, and persecution

What your student will be able to do

• Build a written argument from Scripture, primary sources, and evidence
• Compare rival Christian traditions on how believers should relate to the state
• Analyze a public policy from problem to law to measured outcome
• Explain how prices, wages, money supply, and fiscal policy interact
• Assess a civilization on its own terms rather than through a European lens
• Separate settled science, contested science, and policy preference in a debate

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of History & Geography for Grade 9, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.