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History, when you start at one place and look back along a given line, seems totally linear. For example, tracing your lineage back through your father, sticking only to his surname. But if you examine all your relatives, your genealogy looks more like – well- a tree. If you step back a bit further in your mind and consider broader questions and regions beyond your own local area and time, history looks much more like a three-dimensional mesh, full of crossovers and curving lines and many connections. By “connections” I mean that people and events close and far from each other actually influence each other. Genevieve Foster understood this very well and produced a series of books that are simply mind-blowing. For the middle school student, or even a high school student, who thinks that he or she doesn’t like history, Foster clearly shows this mesh of history as it weaves around certain famous characters and important events. Her text and her beautiful illustrations and charts teach about these characters and events but Foster’s lively books are so much more interesting to read than typical dry history textbooks since she tells the story of the mesh of history that only God can weave. Even dry dates come alive when one learns what else was going on in the world at that time and how so many people and events connected to the topic of her main narrative.
If you watch a spy movie, when someone is introduced as John Smith, we know that is a somewhat mediocre cover name. However, The World of Captain John Smith is about a real man of that same name, who achieved a measure of greatness in a time in history that was bursting with inter-connected activity. Foster takes the reader through this time by focusing on his life, of which the reader will learn much. Captain John Smith lived from 1580 to 1631, a relatively short lifespan of 51 years but full of adventure. We mainly remember Smith for his work in the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in what is now, of course, our country. That was a great adventure, but a few years earlier than that, he had earned his military rank and rank as a gentleman fighting the Turks in Hungary, holding them back from the further conquest of Europe. He was taken prisoner, sold as a slave to a Turkish master, escaped to Russia, and made his way home again.
All that was going on in the world around the Captain, the interwoven mesh of history, was full of sound and fury and change. When Smith was a boy of eight-years-old, England defeated the Spanish Armada. In his lifetime, the Netherlands declared their independence from Spain, which started decades of bloody persecution in that country. But the eventual religious freedom in that country, won through much sacrifice, allowed Jewish people to build a synagogue in Amsterdam. Shakespeare wrote his plays, which have endured to this day as masterpieces of the dramatic arts. Jesuit missionaries went to China. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer whose observations gave Kepler the data with which to derive his three revolutionary laws of orbital motion, was active as the last and greatest of the naked-eye astronomers. In Italy, Galileo proposed laws of motion for earth-bound objects, He greatly improved the telescope, invented in 1608 (the year of the founding of Jamestown), so that in 1609 he was able to discover the four largest moons of Jupiter and saw how heavenly objects moved. The Pilgrims founded the second English colony in North America and their Mayflower Compact became a foundation of US representative government. The Puritans went to Massachusetts and founded the town of Boston and a self-governing commonwealth. Their documents also served as a foundation of American freedom.
All the above, and so much more, can be learned from reading The World of Captain John Smith. I would suggest reading it straight through, but in case a child needs to extract some specific information from the book, there is a very good index. Finally, it would be an interesting exercise to see how many Landmark books cover, in more detail, the topics and people in this book (hint - there are several)!