Did you mean you didn't have a class on civics rather than physics?
Oh, right -- good catch.
In my junior high and high schools, "history" was "social studies."
In my junior high, everything was social studies -- history, government, etc. In high school, it was the Social Studies Department, but individual classes broke that down further. For example, in high school I took an elective in Eastern Religions.
I had one elective on folklore and one on mythology; both were under the English department.
I may have mentioned this before, but my two sons went to two different high schools because we were midway between them. But neither of them had classes in creative writing! Writing a paper for history class was about as much creative writing as they got. I was appalled.