About a year and a half ago, my then 7-year-old son had picked up some books on ancient history from our local library. After devouring them, he decided he wanted to read more about ancient history. I had seen The Story of Civilization series mentioned in some homeschooling groups, so ordered Volume 1 and we have been hooked ever since! While it is marketed as a homeschooling history textbook, we have enjoyed all three books as family read alouds and learned a lot along the way (adults included!) so even if you are not homeschooling, keep reading!
The Story of Civilization covers Western world history from an orthodox Catholic perspective, coherently integrating biblical, church and world history together. This has made for fascinating reading, showing how all these historical events fit together and affected each other. I happened to be reading Volume 1 – The Ancient World aloud to the kids when my bible study group was doing Jeff Cavins’ The Bible Timeline study, which proved fascinating and gave me a clearer context of the biblical events we were studying.
Throughout The Story of Civilization , author Philip Campbell presents history like a story. In each chapter, Campbell includes a section of historical fiction of his own creation, telling the story of a signifcant event or scenario through the perspective of particular historical or fictional characters. This really serves to bring the history alive and my eldest loved these sections so much that he would read ahead between our family read-aloud sessions and just read these bits! I’ve seen these books described as being a Catholic version of Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World books which have been popular with homeschoolers.
Philip Campbell does a great job at condensing a LOT of history into these manageable volumes, with each book roughly 35 chapters and 300-350 pages in length. It does make for a cracking pace at times and can feel like a lot of information. However if you read through them again at a later date, you are bound to have more things stick with each reading. We have read through volumes One to Three once now, with the intention to do some Australian history and then revisit them again to go a bit deeper the next time around. The Story of Civlization is designed to be a whole-family history program (Grades 1-8) that you cycle through in chronological order. If you spend a year on each volume, by the time you come back to Volume 1, each child will be four years older and ready to go a bit deeper into the material. If you are homeschooling, there are supplemental resources to help you with this. While we haven’t listened to the dramatised audio book versions, those that have say only good things about them (there are audio samples on TAN Homeschool website). Philip Campbell also does a great job of presenting the material in a way suitable for younger members of the family without over-simplifying things for the older members of the family.
There are four books in this series with Volume 4 dealing exclusively with American history. Being Aussies, I decided we would just use the first three books. Volume 1 covers Ancient history from the dawn of history and early nomads, through to the time of Christ, the early church and up to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 left off with Constantine’s conversion and follows the spread of Christendom across Europe up to the beginning of the Renaissance. Volume 3 picks up from the Renaissance and the Reformation and its widespread effects, through both world wars and how the Church responded to these changing times.
I did notice that Volume 1 doesn’t cover the biblical events from Creation to Abraham which some other history programs do. If you wanted to cover this it would be simple enough to do this with your bible, a children’s bible or The Great Adventure Storybook before proceeding to begin Volume 1.
Overall we’ve found The Story of Civilization to be engaging, interesting and enjoyable. At the end of each chapter my kids would be begging for “one more chapter!” The books contain a good coverage of historical content for homeschool purposes. They make for an enjoyable and very informative family read aloud whether homeschooling or not, if wanting to supplement school history coverage or just gain a further knowledge of history from a Catholic perspective.
Originally posted 2020-05-04 07:00:24.