That is along the lines of what I hope one day to teach, both in the way of age and subject. Have you had the latitude to select your own textbooks? Do you teach a general course covering world history, or something more specific?
This system has been in place now for about twenty three years - to begin with, it was very biased to the left, but over time with governments from both left and right in power, the bias is less - and with care, you can keep away from most of what is there.
In the two years before these two years (Grades 9 and 10), while we have curriculum guidelines from the state, as a private school, we don't have to follow them. All we really use it for is broad topic outlines - so in Grade 9, we study European and Australian history from 1750-1918 (and the First World War in some detail), and in Grade 10, mid twentieth century history. We also do units on Ancient History (Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome) in Grade 9 and Medieval history (primarily English, but with some Europe and the Crusades) in Grade 10, but that's outside the curriculum guidelines. It means our students do quite a bit more work than the curriculum requires - but certainly not more than they can handle with effort and diligence.
We also intergrate to some extent with other subjects - all boys have to take at least one year of Latin, and those who continue it beyond that point have it interacting with their Roman history studies, for example. We'd probably do more of that if the History teachers (including me) remembered more of our own Latin - but I only did it as a schoolboy myself and it's been a long time since I was a schoolboy now.