A Review of Simply Charlotte Mason’s Stories of the Nations and Stories of America

To give you an idea of the clever way these books are written to enlighten and engage, I’ve typed out a few examples of some of my favorite sections/parts from a few volumes –

The beginning of Stories of the World, Volume 1 is so captivating.  I LOVE Chapter 1 ‘A Bird’s-Eye View’.  It invites the readers to come on a journey, here’s a piece:

“It is a strange journey we are going to take.  Our route lies not through space, but through time.  Not over land and water, but backward over the years.  We are going to set out on a journey over the Old World….  The Old World is so big and has so many countries that I think one had better go over it by balloon, and look down on it as a bird does when flying through the clouds… But how little we see of the land beneath us.   Clouds spread thickly over it and blot out nearly the whole of Australia and great regions of Africa and Asia.  A dense cloud of ignorance rests upon them and hides from view, for we are sailing in the year 1550, when very little was known about these continents…”


(Stories of the Nations, Volume 1, pgs. 7-8)

Oh my gosh!  Don’t you love it?

My kids were hooked.  They love me to read them these stories and this opening was so perfect!

More hints of what to expect:

“…To tell the whole story of our Civil War would take a book five times as large as this, so all I can do is to draw a sort of outline map of it.  A civil war, you should know, means a war within a nation, where part of a people fights against the other part.  A war between two nations is called a foreign war…”  


(Stories of America, Volume 2, page 36)

“All around Boston the farmers and villagers began to collect guns and powder and to drill men into soldiers.  These were called ‘minute men’ which meant that they would be ready to fight at a minute’s notice, if they were asked to.  When people begin to get ready in this way, war is usually not far off…”


Stories of America, Volume 1, page 101)


“I am curious how many of my readers ask questions.  I fancy many of you do.  But I am also curious how many of my readers set out to answer their questions for themselves.  It is much easier to sit and wait for someone else to discover and explain the answers, is it not?  And yet, if every person sat and waited for others to do the work, answers would be few and far between.  The man I want to tell you about now was such a man as asked questions and then set about to find the answers himself.  Like the great Galileo, he carefully observed what was going on around him, then set up experiments to learn more.  His name was Isaac Newton, and he was born in England the same year that Galileo dies in Italy.”


Stories of the Nations, Volume 1, page 63)










These books can be used with the Simply Charlotte Mason Family guides or as stand alone history books.  Either would be a huge benefit to any homeschool.


These are narratives that not only the children love, but I love as well.  They are perfect family read-alouds and I highly recommend them for the study of early modern history and modern history!

Blessings.