In what order should I use the Dave Raymond History Series?
We recommend the following order:
- American History (Age 12+)
- Modernity | World History (Age 13+)
- Antiquity | Ancient History (Age 14+)
- Christendom | Medieval History (Age 14+)
Dave Raymond gives an overview and explains his history series in this video:
Transcript
Hi, I'm Dave Raymond, and I've had the privilege of being able to teach students history for the past 20 years. This curriculum I developed largely as a labor of love, not having any idea if anyone really watched it. We've now learned that thousands of people have benefited from it and have found it to be something worthwhile. That's something that I find wonderfully encouraging, and I hope it is something that is helpful to you.
So the history curriculum is divided up into four years, or four time periods. That is designed, in part, to give students a better chance to actually dive deeply into each of those four time periods. One of the approaches of this class that's different is we're not a textbook-based curriculum. If anything, we're a lecture-based curriculum, but then also a primary source-based curriculum. I want students to actually read the voices of the past.
I want students to see how story-based this curriculum is. I want them to see how incredible the men and women of the past are, and not just have history be a series of facts, or a series of demographic data, for example, that's divorced from humanity. Instead, you're looking at people. You're looking at real people who had real hopes and dreams. You're looking at real examples of God's providence in time. American history is primarily a study of us. It's a study of our founding.
Now, I actually go back further, starting with the Mesoamericans, so we can have a sense of who was here before us. We go through the explorers, learn all of their passions and reasons for discovering, and then go through the colonial period. But that founding period we definitely camp out at. It's one of the most rich periods in all of history. We go all the way through the 19th century, the Civil War, and we end with Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, an amazing friendship and amazing leadership at the start of the 20th century.
Modernity sort of picks up where American history left off, but also goes further back. It really studies European history from the Enlightenment forward. How do we get to our modern culture? How do we get to the various isms, the various worldviews that we deal with? So we're looking at European history for quite a while, looking at guys like Robespierre, for example, or Napoleon. But then by the time we get to the 20th century, we bring in the American timeline that we left from the previous year, and really see how these two powers, the European power and the American power, shaped the 20th century and then shaped our world today.
Antiquity takes the story of the Old Testament and sets it in ancient history. Students are going to be able to see, here's the Old Testament stories that they've been taught since they were young, and then here is how they fit in world history at large. One of the most incredible lessons of antiquity is the sheer contrast, the antithesis between ancient pagan cultures, which exhaust themselves, and then ancient Israel, which is all headed towards the redemptive moment of the incarnation of Christ, and then, of course, the crucifixion and the resurrection, which is how we end the study of antiquity.
Christendom is probably the most mature and the most developed of the four years. It covers the history of the church, from its beginning in Acts all the way up through the Reformation. It shows that Christians can be faithful, that Christians can fail miserably and yet be redeemed. It's one of the most honest curriculums I think we've done, but also it shows the sheer vastness and the richness of the church. Everything from its art to its churches to its missionaries to its effect on culture itself. It's one of the most incredible works I think I've ever done and it's probably the best of these four years.
So I want students to take this class and the benefits I'm thinking about they'll get from this class are things like historical knowledge, knowing what's actually happened in the past to help explain who we are today, but also things like realizing we're just scratching the surface. This is just an entryway into what's out there. So I want to develop a sense of lifelong learning and I want them to do that with critical thinking.
I want them to be able to think through things biblically. I want them to be able to think through things with Christian ethics in mind. I also want them to be encouraged and to realize that God has always been faithful and continues to always be faithful.
So a typical week in this curriculum looks like five lecture videos designed to be watched Monday through Friday. There are primary source readings to go along with the videos for Monday through Thursday, and then an exam that sort of ends the week on Friday. Beyond that, there's a weekly portfolio entry, as well as steps that students can take on their project each week as they're working towards something for the quarter.
And of course, all of these things are adaptable to suit your needs. So if you need to pick and choose from various primary source readings, if you would like to do exams, perhaps as a verbal exercise, or if you would like, for example, to take your own pace through the curriculum, you can do that.
Sometimes when I end my in-person classes for the year, and there's sort of like this moment where we're all realizing, okay, this is it for the year, I'll sometimes quote a former student of mine who once said that the benefit she learned from studying history, from studying really the humanities, was to not let the old stories become old. That is, they always have life to them because they're always revealing what really matters, what's really true.