By Genevieve Foster
A history that runs sideways: everything happening around the whole world during George Washington's lifetime, laid out together instead of one country at a time.
Most history books take one country and run it from top to bottom. Foster does the opposite. She takes a single lifetime, 1732 to 1799, and cuts straight across the whole planet at once. So the chapter on Washington's boyhood in Virginia also has Ch'ien-lung ruling China, Captain Cook out on the Pacific in the same pages as Valley Forge, and Mozart a small boy somewhere while a war is being lost. Foster called it horizontal history. She was doing it in 1941, when almost nobody was, and almost nobody does it now, which is a large part of why a book this old is still in print.
Most history teaching leaves children with the past in separate boxes, the Revolution box, the France box, the China box, with nothing running between them. This is the best cure for that I know of, and it works because of how it's built, not how it's written. Once your child has seen a single year of the world laid out sideways, they may start doing it on their own, asking what was happening in Japan during the Civil War. That question is where understanding history actually begins, and it's hard to reach any other way. Fair warning: it's long and dense and will take a term to get through. Foster drew every illustration and timeline in it herself.