A Mother's Journal ~ A Bit of Birdsong

By now you know me and thrift stores.  Yes ma’am. 

Coincidentally, one of the glorious things about my job is that right next to the store I work in is – you guessed it — a thrift store!  ~:-D  So you know I walk through there for a hot second every day to see what’s on the shelves.

Yesterday I was thrilled to find a history book, and I mean exactly what I have been thinking I needed to have for our interest in a classical education these days.  It was publised in 1935, so those who labored to put this massive book together could not know of the impending World War.  It is bittersweet to hold the book and think of just that fact.

It’s The Illustrated World History — A Record of World Events from Earliest Historical Times to the Present Day.  Edited by Sir John Hammerton and Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes.  Illustrated with Nearly One Thousand Historical Documents and Scores of Specially Drawn Maps.  New York, WM. H. Wise & Co.  MCMXXXV

This book is an awesome resource for history up to the time the book was published.  It begins with ancient history in the Nile and Euphrates river basins, Egypt and Mesopotamia.  The book has 1144 pages and beautiful black and white picture illustrations. 

I don’t know what it is about history books, but I can hardly resist the old ones.  It gives me a cold chill to hold history in my hand — just a book — and know that kingdoms, common men and women, martyrs, soldiers, impassioned lovers, plagues, famines, and the joys of everday living are wrapped up neatly in sentences for future generations, who will do the same things.  One day you and I will be wrapped up neatly in the pages of a book, just tiny, probably nameless parts of a larger fabric that makes up a chapter for others to read.  They’ll read not about us, but about the great events of our time.

I was reading on the last page of the text of the book: 

Imperialism is curbed by the shortage of capital for export, the collapse of foreign credit, and the exhaustion of virgin areas for investment and the export of capital.

Little did they know.  And there’s more.  Would the authors reconsider this statement?:

Our technology for production has far outrun the mass purchasing power of man necessary to utilize the increased volume of products.

Our consumption of “products” has only grown.  The need for homes to have computers and extra televisions and cars; and, elementary school-aged children carrying around cell phones and pocket-sized video games would stun the authors!

Finally:

World war, using the deadly methods of destruction now available, may drag all civilization down once more to the level of barbarism.

Perhaps they did see that the stage was set for World War II.  I won’t even go into the benefits that came from World War II, nor will I ponder here about the state of the world today.

Anyway, one of the things I am most excited about is that each chapter begins with a table of dates for that chapter.

I say again, it’s just what I was looking for.

I know I have made this entry picture-rich.  Please bear with me.  One more picture.   Look at the inside cover.  I love it!

It says:

I know as well as you that history is only a succession of images.  That is why I love it; that is why it suits men.  It is the romance of the universe.  If it is not entirely true, it contains truths your statistics will never contain.  Old history is an art; she paints man and the passions of man, the most faithful images that man has traced of himself.  It is a portrait…  Anatole France.

There’s more to come about making your own timeline notebook.  When you see our timeline notebook and hear of our studies, you’ll see why I so love this book.