Big Spiral History, year 1

At a glance · The world in your head · Q’s and A’s

Build the history of everything into your home — and into your family’s memory. Four mornings a week, you’ll receive a quick (3–5 minute) video of a story from history, each told in a different genre, and placed in the “history memory palace” built throughout your house. By the end of the year, your family will have the great thread of life, the universe, and everything inside your heads, and be able to connect everything you learn to history.

How it works

Big Spiral History starts with an audacious goal: secure all of history in your family’s memory. During this year-long blitz, you’ll encounter 144 essential stories from the Big Bang to the rise of ChatGPT. By the end of the year, you’ll have made a map of the past that can become the home for everything you learn in the future.

Four mornings a week

Four mornings each week, you’ll receive a quick video telling one story. Each lasts only three to five minutes — but it tells the story in a distinctive dramatic genre. The end of the Cretaceous is post-apocalyptic horror. Ötzi the Iceman, a murder mystery. Blackbeard, a tragedy.

This is history built to lodge itself deep in your imaginations.

Turn your home into a memory palace

In the first week, we’ll help you build your history memory palace — a living timeline, snaking through your home. We’ll help you prepare the places where your 144 stories will live. For the next 30 weeks, you’ll hear four stories each week, and place images of them around your home. Gradually, your walls (and your minds!) will become alive with the whole sweep of history.

Who’s this for?

We can tell you the sorts of people this might not be for.

1. Kids who want to spend months burrowing deeply into one time period. This is a romp through everything — though it will help give context for specific periods.

2. Very sensitive kids who are overwhelmed by death, disaster, or suspense. We’ll handle these topics carefully, but we won’t pretend history is cotton candy.

3. Kids who hate dramatic framing and want a plain, textbook account. Probably these kids exist? Probably we should mention them here?

4. Families looking for a specific interpretation of history. Childhood is for exploration — which includes exploring different perspectives. To raise full adults, we need to help our kids explore the many sides of humanity. (If you have a specific concern, please write us.)

5. Older teens who need a conventional high-school course. At this time, we don’t have long readings, demand essays, or do much primary source analysis.

This is especially suited for kids who need history to feel like something, because we tell good stories.

More than sparkly stories

A well-told story is more powerful than it appears. It’s compact: different people can take away quite different things from it. It’s memorable: it can live in our heads, and grow along with us. Because we teach in stories, your whole family can share the same curriculum together. And once you have these stories in your heads, you can begin to connect them together into the vast narratives that historians and social scientists argue over — questions of wars, nations, technology, gender, religion, and more.

Going deeper

Each story comes with:

• an image to print out and color — and, if you’d like, put up in its spot on the wall

• a typed transcript to read aloud

• a geographical location to commit to memory

• a PDF of recommendations for how to go deeper — excellent books, YouTube videos, and movies

We’re also developing activities so you can play inside the stories and connect them together through games and songs. Families who want to go fast can keep it to 10 minutes a day. Families who become a little obsessed can keep digging.

A place for everything

For many people (including history majors!), history is a swirl of names and dates. But for your family, by the end of this year, history will be a chain of stories, mapped throughout your home, that you carry around with you wherever you go.

And this may be the biggest gift of all: almost everything else your family learns has an origin story. Scientific discoveries, technologies, grammar rules, sports, musical styles, political ideas — they all came from somewhere, and were shaped by people and time. With this living timeline inside your heads, you can give everything you learn about a home. This makes it easier to remember, easier to understand, and much, much more interesting.