By V.M. Hillyer
The whole of human history told fast and cheerfully by one headmaster who thought children could handle it, written in 1924 and still on nearly every homeschool list.
Virgil Hillyer ran the Calvert School in Baltimore, could not find a history book he liked, and so wrote one himself for the children in front of him. That is exactly what it sounds like. Seventy-nine short chapters take you from the first people to roughly the present, four or five pages at a sitting, in the voice of a man leaning on the front of the desk. He tells you the Great Pyramid is older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us. He tells you Rome fell and then says what that actually meant to somebody standing there. He is funny, he is opinionated, he never talks down, and he never once stops for a review question. A hundred years on, it is still the fastest way to give a child the shape of the whole thing, the sense that history is one long story and they are standing at the end of it.
Most history for children arrives in pieces, a unit on Egypt, a unit on Rome, and the pieces never join up. This one is a single voice going straight through from beginning to end, so your child finishes with a shape in their head instead of a pile of topics. The chapters are four pages, which means it survives a school year at one a day, and Hillyer's whole method is to hang a fact on something a child already has, a birthday, a walk, a grandmother. That is why it has outlasted a hundred years of better-researched books.