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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.
The World of Columbus and Sons follows Foster’s approach by focusing on the life of the great explorer, Christopher Columbus, and, in what adds interest to the narrative, his two sons, Ferdinand and Diego. Ferdinand Columbus should be particularly inspiring to the Plumfield libraries because he built, over many years and a lot of effort, a 15,000-volume private library, one of the biggest in the world. Foster’s book covers the years 1451, when Columbus was born, to 1539, when Ferdinand died. This period of history was incredibly exciting, with the Renaissance and the Reformation exploding into Europe. The great age of discovery was opened by Portugal, followed by many other countries that sent out explorers. Leonardo da Vinci grew up and learned to paint and invent, and his rival Michelangelo burst onto Europe with his painting and sculpture. The War of the Roses consumed England, Baber, the eventual Mongol conqueror of northern India, was growing up, and Ivan became the first Tsar of a united Russia. And of course, the voyages of Christopher Columbus opened up the New World for colonization by Europeans.
The battle between Christianity and Islam was going on, just like today. After King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, in southwestern Europe, completed the 700-year re-conquest of Spain by defeating the last Muslim city, Columbus came to their court to offer them the chance to finance his voyage of discovery. Forty years before that, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had stood for 1000 years as a bastion of the faith, was conquered by the emerging Turkish Empire, which went on to threaten southeastern Europe but was eventually defeated.
All the above, and so much more, can be learned from reading The World of Columbus and Sons. 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)!