History Curricula

The purpose of this wiki is primarily to provide good history lesson ideas and resources to families that might otherwise be uncertain about how to dive into a deeper and broader knowledge of history -- everything that has ever been, and much that no longer is. Growing in our grasp of historical lore helps us understand who we are and tunes our imagination to all that is possible. It makes our arguments deeper and richer.

However, because history contains so much, teachers speaking of it is often deeply boring because it takes so long to grasp what is essential and powerful. It takes a lot of training that may not be available to people working on the fly without state support.

Meanwhile, almost no history textbooks render history in a way that is either 1) narratively compelling or 2) analytically valuable.

Students are right to be bored to tears with the dreadful representation of history in textbooks as interminable lists of facts.

A wiki might do a better job of providing an easily navigable guide to major historical topics and themes, vivid stories, comparisons of representative artifacts, and analytical prompts.

History of America

Stories of colonial times to the 1990s.

Colonial Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Albion's Seed
2. Tobacco Brides
3. Natives
4. Founding Fathers
5. Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin
6. Revolutionary War
7. Early Explorers
8. Yeomanry
9. Founding of Colleges
10. Tidewater
11. The Five Civilized Tribes
12. The Empire of Liberty
13. The Plantations
14. Universalists
15. The Navy & The Barbary Wars
16. The Mathers
17. George Washington
18. Thomas Jefferson
19. Alexander Hamilton
20. Powhatan and Pocahontas
21. William Penn
22. Aaron Burr
23. Thomas Hutchinson
24. Lyman Beecher
25. Baron von Steuben
26. Lafayette
27. Pulaski
28. Nathan Hale
29. Jonathan Edwards
30. Timothy Dwight
31. Metacomet
32. James Wilson
33. John Winthrop
34. William Johnson, the White Savage
35. Jean Nicolet
36. Henry Ware and the Unitarians
37. Haym Salomon
38. Anne Bailey
39. Arthur St. Clair
40. Samuel Hopkins
41. Eleazar Wheelock
42. James Wilkinson
43. Benjamin Rush
44. Shays' Rebellion
45. The Whiskey Rebellion
46. The Sullivan Expedition
47. Trumbull
48. Gilbert Stuart
49. Manumission

John Paul Jones

Romantic Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Lewis & Clark
2. War of 1812
3. The Whig Party
4. Manifest Destiny
5. Trail of Tears
6. Louisiana Purchase
7. Mexican American War
8. Second Great Awakening
9. Transcendentalists
10. Utopians
11. Philadelphia Bible Riots
12. Nativism & Know-Nothings
13. Mass Production, American System of Manufactures
14. Mormonism
15. The Burned Over District
16. The Cult of Domesticity
17. Steamboats
18. Individualism
19. The Gold Rush
20. 48ers
21. Slavocracy
22. The Civil War
23. Abolitionists
24. The Wide Awakes
25. The Pig War
26. Boston Brahmin
27. The Benevolent Empire
28. Bureau of Indian Affairs
29. Henry Clay
30. John Jacob Astor
31. Johnny Appleseed
32. Wyatt Earp
33. John Smith
34. Brigham Young
35. P.T. Barnum
36. Mountain Men
37. Nathaniel Taylor
38. John Brown Smith & Ellen Goodell
39. Erie Canal
40. Levi Strauss

Gilded & Progressive Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Miraculous Inventions
2. American Amusements
3. Rain Follows the Plow
4. New Money, Philanthropy, Robber Barons
5. Manifest Destiny
6. American empire
7. German Assimilation
8. Alaska Gold Rush
9. Railroads
10. Nature's Metropolis
11. Indian Wars
12. Boomtowns
13. Frontier Thesis
14. Progressive Society
15. Seward's Folly
16. Barnum & Bailey's
17. Chicago World's Fair
18. Victoria Woodhull & Free Love
19. Spiritualism
20. Eugenics
21. Hydraulic Society
22. Range Wars
23. The Buffalo
24. Bimetallism
25. Ellis Island
26. East Coast Ethnic Enclaves
27. Cowboys
28. Miners
29. Company Towns
30. Child Labor
31. Panning for Gold
32. Chief Joseph
33. Bicycles
34. Taking Hawaii
35. Woodrow Wilson
36. The Great War
37. Oneida Community
38. Ford's Theatre
39. Benjamin Tillman
40. J.P. Morgan
41. Mosquito Fleets
42. Picture Brides
43. Forbes
44. Patrick Kennedy
45. John D. Rockefeller
46. Andrew Carnegie
47. Vanderbilts
48. Custer and the Great Sioux War
49. General Philip Sheridan
50. Geronimo
51. Chicago Fire
52. Daniel Burnham
53. Jesse James
54. The Wright Brothers
55. Boeing
56. Houdini
57. Frederick Russell Burnham
58. Mary Baker Edy
59. Dow Chemical
60. The Fence Cutters War
61. The Los Angeles Times bombing
62. Locusts of 1875
63. The Nature Fakers
64. Miner's War
65. Seattle Fire
66. Coca Cola
67. Gibson Girls

Jazz Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Big Bosses
2. The Depression
3. Prohibition
4. Flappers
5. Cigarettes
6. Marketing
7. The New Deal
8. Art Deco
9. Hillbillies
10. War Economy
11. Wartime Propaganda
12. Pearl Harbor
13. D-Day
14. Family Planning
15. Radio
16. American Songbook & Tin Pan Alley
17. Lend Lease Agreement
18. The Great Migration
19. Douglas MacArthur
20. FDR
21. Comstock Laws
22. Einstein
23. Patton
24. Eisenhower
25. Lindbergh
26. Howard Hughes
27. Al Capone
28. John Herbert Dillinger
29. Amelia Earhart
30. Reinhold Niebuhr
31. Ezra Pound
32. Babe Ruth
33. Jackie Robinson
34. Joe DiMaggio
35. William Laurence
36. Pearl Buck
37. Alice Bailey
38. William Bullitt Jr.
39. George Balanchine
40. Will Geer
41. Joe Louis
42. Guy Ballard
43. Sacco and Vanzetti
44. The Ponzi Scheme
45. The Scopes Monkey Trial
46. The St. Valentine's Massacre
47. The Lindbergh Kidnapping
48. Anthony Bimba
49. Radium Girls
50. Dust Bowl Photography
51. Grand Coulee Dam
52. Hoover Dam
53. Alpha Bravo Charlie - Phonetic Alphabets
54. Oppenheimer

Atomic Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Beatniks
2. Space Race
3. Cold War
4. Car Culture
5. Suburbia
6. White Flight
7. The American Teenager
8. Rock n Roll
9. The Military Industrial Complex
10. The Deep State
11. American Hegemony
12. The Baby Boom
13. The Civil Rights Movement
14. The Great Society
15. Demobilization
16. Post Industrialism
17. Brown V Board
18. Suez Crisis
19. Bay of Pigs
20. Cuban Missile Crisis
21. Television
22. TV Dinners
23. Tiki lounge
24. British Invasion
25. Coeds
26. Going Steady
27. James Dean & Blue jeans
28. Kenneth Cooper's Aerobic Exercise
29. Sitcoms
30. Affirmative Action
31. Agent Orange
32. McNamara's Folly
33. Truman Doctrine
34. Area Redevelopment Administration
35. The Pill
36. The Highway
37. The Dulles Brothers
38. J. Edgard Hoover
39. Buzz Aldrin
40. Jack Parsons
41. The Alsop Brothers
42. Lyndon B. Johnson
43. Klaus Fuchs
44. John van Neumann
45. Billy Graham
46. Malcolm X
47. Martin Luther King
48. Lee Harvey Oswald
49. Hugh Hefner
50. James J. Angleton
51. Emmett Till
52. Lolita Lebrón
53. Johnny Carson
54. Rosenberg Trials
55. Joseph McCarthy
56. Roy Cohn
57. Gouzenko Affair
58. Elvis
59. Bob Dylan
60. Saul Alinsky
61. Wolfman Jack
62. David Dubinsky
63. Thomas Hayden
64. Salvatore Giancana
65. Ralph David Abernathy
66. Richard Cushing
67. McGovern & Eagleton
68. Barry Goldwater
69. Medgar Wiley Evers
70. Lenny Bruce
71. Alger Hiss
72. Fulton Sheen & Francis Spellman
73. Ella Baker
74. Muhammad Ali
75. Sugar Ray Robinson
76. John Birch Society
77. Fermilab
78. The Black Panther Party
79. NATO
80. Hell's Angels
81. Ed Sullivan Show
82. RAND Corporation
83. The Woodwards
84. FBI
85. Little Rock
86. Thích Quảng Đức
87. The 1958 Lebanon Crisis
88. The Freedom Train
89. U-2 Spy Plane
90. The KKK
91. Freedom Summer
92. The Korean War
93. Disneyland
94. EPCOT
95. Oroville Dam
96. Dworshak Dam
97. Norman Rockwell
98. Xerox
99. Xerox
100. Xerox
101. Xerox
102. Xerox
103. Xerox

Postmodern Age

Core Lessons:

Expanded Pages:

1. Hippies
2. The Personal Computer
3. Ted Kaczynski
4. Serial Killers
5. Rousas Rushdoony
6. Disparate Impact
7. Ecology
8. Abortion
9. The Cultural Revolution
10. The Bobos
11. The End of History
12. The Sunbelt
13. The Bush Family
14. The Clintons
15. Times of Crime
16. Saturday Night Fever
17. L. Ron Hubbard & Scientology
18. Madonna
19. Jonestown
20. Claude Dallas
21. Ram Dass
22. USAID
23. NGOs
24. John Paul Getty III
25. Challenger Explosion
26. The Kent State Shooting
27. Clarence Thomas
28. Harvey Milk & Daniel James White
29. Nixon Goes To China
30. CIA-backed Coups
31. Watergate
32. Desegregations
33. Jimmy Hoffa
34. Closing Alcatraz
35. Noam Chomsky
36. Paul Simon
37. Phyllis Schlafly

History of Christendom

Stories of Christendom from the barbarian kings to postmodern globalism.

History of Christendom

History of the World

Missions, Empire, Foreign Policy, and all the other nations of Earth