Story of the World, Vol. 2: History for the Classical Child: The Middle Ages

The author has a strong bias against Muslims and for Evangelical Christians. Bible stories are presented as history with a Christian tilt. For example, God introduces the Christian version of himself to Abraham (not even in the Bible) and promises Israel to his only son Isaac (not including Ishmael as Muslims believe). The author teaches that God will fight against Abraham's enemies, arguing that God fought against the Egyptians during Moses. This sets the stage to take the Christian side during the crusades and plays into the current debate with the Palestinians.Christian history is white-washed, with the church fighting slavery, promoting education and with members choosing to follow out of love rather than coercion. Muslims command their followers and are presented as violent with their story altered and the Quran misquoted. Their fighters are one-dimensional, with their only desire being to violently spread Islam. She emphasizes the connection between religion and violence of Muslim conquerors and judges them based on events that happened hundreds of years ago. For Christian conquerors, she emphasizes glory and the resulting peace and stability or ignores their religion altogether, making it seem Christians were never bad and Muslims were never good. She uses scare tactics to justify the crusades (what would happen to Christianity if Islam spread?) which echo the scare tactics we hear today against Muslims.As I was reading the book with my son, I kept having to correct what he was reading; no, Muslims don't believe in stealing to satisfy their hunger, no, Muslims didn't attack Mecca unprovoked, no Mohammad didn't go around killing all non-Muslims in Mecca and just because his book teaches it doesn't mean it is true. I worry a parent who was less aware of history would not catch all the misinformation.She favors Catholics throughout the book until the Protestant revolution, which she explains by comparing Catholics to an abusive aunt and Protestants to a loving aunt.I understand that there are people who want an Evangelical-based history book (this series certainly merges Bible stories with history), but I think you can do that without attacking other people, and you certainly shouldn't change the history in order to do so. Even Jesus taught you should love your enemies and bless those who curse you.Jesus would not approve of this book.

PROS: Easy-to-read, fairly engaging, a good mix of history and folk stories, hits most of the big stuff. I like that it's mostly text with relatively few pictures. We supplement with DK publishing histories, which are less thorough and less-well organized, but have great pictures, so that the kids get a good sense of the look of things as well.CONS: Def. Western-centric (though less than some of its competitors), and def. focused more on wars/politicians/history of power, and not much at all on history of ideas, art, philosophy, etc. Due to the breadth of the survey, there's little material connecting what happens in one place and time to any other.Western-centric: Bauer includes lots of material on other cultures, it's true, but most of this is through the lens of Western history. Which is fair. And she does a much better job than most other material for this age group. If you use the book as a backbone rather than a sole resource, it should mostly work out anyway. I found it necessary to also buy a) a more completist survey that I use to supplement or contextualize when random non-Western countries show up in SOTW and b) a full-on history of China. Because Bauer has the kids so engaged with text, I found sources that were comics for these things:  Cartoon History of the Universe Volumes 1-7  Gonick's History of the Universe/Modern World series and Jin Lui's Understanding China through Comics series https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Chinese-Civilization-Emperor-Understanding/dp/1611720273/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510679206&sr=1-1&keywords=jing+liu&dpID=61JZ4KwqoaL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srchChina has always been a tremendous power and has influenced much of history in that part of the world, so the terse coverage it receives in SOTW makes for some problems in giving children a more coherent idea of what happened almost anywhere East of Turkey.History of Ideas: I would love to see the author in future editions make a list of resources at the end of each chapter... suggested art, music, important thinkers, scientists, etc. These are things you see in other courses of course, but as the history series tends to be the backbone for the classical education, it would simplify teaching greatly to find a short list of suggested related topics right in the text. I'm getting pretty good at balancing multiple history book (music, art, philosophy) on my desk at the same time, but I would have love to see these things more incorporated. Or, maybe a secondary textbook on history of ideas and culture? I appreciate the trickiness of organizing such a tremendous amount of information, so perhaps that would be the way to go.

I am not Christian, and I was worried that this book would have a lot of Xian mythos and theological musings instead of, you know, the history of the middle ages. I was really pleased to NOT find any of that. Instead, my 10 year old daughter absolutely enjoyed the heck out of this. The content was spot on and easy to comprehend. And I loved how it made her trace the stories through a map incorporating geography. I used a world globe along with this book and I encourage you to do so too. I definitely recommend this regardless of religious affiliation. I'm going to be buying the rest of this series.

I've been homeschooling my children for 16 years, and was homeschooled as a child, as well. Throughout this journey, I have not seen a more fun and engaging history text for children than Story of the World. It flows like a story (which is how I believe history is best taught) and doesn't bog down in too many details. I believe it draws students in with the excitement of history and leaves them hungering for more.I do history with all of my children at the same time, so my current students are 5, 7, 10, and 15. They all enjoy these stories, and are able to see how history is not a disconnected, unrelated jumble of names and dates, but a fascinating story that continues to this day.We use this book as one of our "spines" and supplement with lots of other books to expand the narrative (as suggested in the Activity Guide in this series). I read aloud from this book (and series) almost daily. Highly recommended!

I really like Susa Bauer’s books (The Well Trained Mind is a must read for parents). Book 1 (Ancient) is also really good and I definitely recommend it. This one has many inconsistencies and some of the examples she gives are absolutely ridiculous. I would say that any topic related to the Catholic Church should be viewed with skepticism (she demonstrates a biased view against the Catholic Church). This book is very mainstream so If you are homeschooling or looking for a classic book to teach/supplement history to you children at home I would say there are better ones to use.

I love this series. The stories and method of telling history as a continuing story helps the kids remember and push the information so that it sticks. The activity books are properly cool with the best activity in the first book being how to mummify a chicken. Properly gruesome and brilliant.

A good place to start...but you need to make it your own. E.g. being American misses out skims some British history - like the Magna Carter

Absolutely brilliant cds. The boys (8 and 6) love them and we listen to them in the car all the time. I have learnt so much too!

My 10 year old son loved this book as he is really into this time in histroy. It makes history very accessable to younger readers.