Since we started homeschooling our kiddos, we've had a chance to review many textbooks. For history, we settled on "
America the Beautiful".
I'll be honest, it's slanted toward Christian ethics and perspective. Each chapter ends with a verse of scripture. We chose this, but it's not for everyone.
That said, the detail and quality are excellent. I find myself learning new things all the time that I never learned in school.
To whit, today my son and I learned about Noah Webster. Famous for creating the Webster dictionary, he was pivotal in setting up American English and separating our language from that of Britain. Through the creation of a speller book, a grammar book, and a reader book, (the combination of which he entitled the "Institute") and distributing it across the country, he is attributed as being one of the most influential people to American education in our nation's history. His dictionary was adopted by the United States Congress as the official dictionary of the congress, and his literature likely influenced the writing of the U.S. Constitution. He turned down an in-person request by George Washington to tutor his grandchildren, stating that his work was too important to sacrifice. The final dictionary he wrote defined 70,000 words, and when he was writing the entry for the very last word, almost suffered an existential crisis; his mind flooding with the possibility that he could die while writing it and never complete his last version. Moments later, after completing the entry, he paced for a few moments and recovered.
That kind of lesson fascinates me.
It doesn't hurt to have some of the classics on hand either. I have a book which is a collection of famous documents (e.g. declaration/constitution) and speeches, as well as a copy of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", considered to be the primary document for convincing citizens to support independence from Britain.
Thank you!
