Chronological History

Sometimes we speak of world history as though it belongs to people. It doesn't—it belongs to God, and though people play prominently within the historical narrative, it always remains under God's auspices and control. The problem with losing the right perspective isn't that we'll get the facts wrong, it's that we'll fail to understand what they mean, what the purpose of past events is, and what we can look forward to.

Human history began all at once in the same place: the Garden of Eden, where God made Adam and Eve as the crown of all Creation. He told them to fill the earth and take dominion of it, and He also told them not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They ate the fruit anyway, and mankind was removed from paradise and introduced to tension, pain, and resistance.

The story of the world is in many ways simply the story of adversity. For the enemies of God, it's adversity in the form of the failure and futility of purely human endeavor; for God's people, it's the story of fighting for the truth against secular philosophies, fighting for holiness despite the pervasiveness of sin, and fighting for the Gospel in the face of persecution and death.

Jesus Christ is our only hope. He is the Prince of Peace, the defeater of Death, and the King of the Universe, the saver of souls and the punisher of wickedness. His kingdom is the restoration and glorious fulfillment of the paradise from which Adam and Eve were removed, and we work, wait, hope and pray for the quick fulfillment of His will in all things.

This is our framework for history. While it's important to study things like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the ancient Near East, it's only important when investigated through the lens of God's ultimate sovereignty and plan. The story of mankind is the story of redemption, and only when we analyze battles, kings, treaties, and catastrophes from God's perspective can we truly make sense of them.

Otherwise, it's all fairly irrelevant and useless. Sure, there's Napoleon's dictum that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, but a quick survey of the past will show that each successive generation does repeat the sins of their fathers, and that without Christ's real physical life on Earth as a centering point, there's no real cause for optimism or hope of any kind.

Christ's love not only makes the trajectory of history cause for hope; it reveals the truly great moments of the past, events that to the secular eye seem insignificant or even pernicious. We're speaking of the progress of the true Church, of course, and of each soul that God calls and makes His own through the agency of His Holy Spirit. These are the milestones we look for and celebrate.

We carry a lot of world history products. Because it's the story of God's work in the world and our human responses, we believe it's important to know and understand. Not everything we carry is Christian; there are plenty of secular resources here. We encourage you to use whichever ones work best for your situation, but that you do so with a view to understanding the will and work of the One who made history in the first place.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he is a husband and father, teaches adult Sunday school in his Presbyterian congregation, and likes weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.

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1066: The Year of the Conquest
by David Howarth
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11 Days in December
by Stanley Weintraub
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1776
by David McCullough
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1861: The Civil War Awakening
by Adam Goodheart
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Age of Religious Wars
by Richard S. Dunn
2nd edition from W. W. Norton and Co.
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Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
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America's Longest War
by George C. Herring
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American Civil War
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American Passage
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Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
by Gordon S. Wood
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Arguing about Slavery
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Band of Brothers
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Short Oxford History of the Modern World
by Robert Gildea
3rd edition from Oxford University
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Battle Cry of Freedom
Oxford History of the United States
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from Oxford University
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Birth of the Modern
by Paul Johnson
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Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge
by John S. D. Eisenhower
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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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Boys of Summer
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Boys' Crusade
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Buffalo Bill and the Wild West
by Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright
Reprint from International Cody Family Assoc.
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Carolingian Chronicles
by Bernhard Walter Scholz (translator) with Barbara Rogers
2000 Printing from University of Michigan Press
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Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
by Max Hastings
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Churchill: Walking with Destiny
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Citizen Soldiers
by Stephen Ambrose
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Civil War: A History
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Civil War: A Narrative - 3 Volume Set
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Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
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Colonial Period: 1607-1750
American History by Era Volume 2
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Columbus and Cortez, Conquerors for Christ
by John Eidsmoe
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Coolidge
by Amity Shlaes
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Crusades
by Hilaire Belloc
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Daily Life in Johnson's London
by Richard B. Schwartz
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Defining Moment
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Devil in Massachusetts
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Discoverers
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Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men
by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
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Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century
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Empire Rising
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England's Glorious Revolution 1688-1689
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FDR
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Flags of Our Fathers
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Forever Free
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From Distant Days
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Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
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Girl in the Picture
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God's Battalions
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Great Bridge
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Great Crash: 1929
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Heyday
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History of Britain 2
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History of the Twentieth Century
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Honor in the Dust
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How the West Won
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In Search of the Dark Ages
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Invention of Nature
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Island at the Center of the World
by Russell Shorto
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Japan 1941
by Eri Hotta
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Junior Officer's Reading Club
by Patrick Hennessey
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Labor's Untold Story
by Herbert M. Morais, Richard O. Boyer
3rd edition from United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of Amer
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by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall
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Lafayette Flying Corps Volume 2
by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall
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$21.00
Legacy of John Calvin
The Calvin 500 Series
by David W. Hall
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Biography for 9th-Adult
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Life in Medieval Times
by Marjorie Rowling
Reissue from Perigee Books
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Mayflower
by Nathaniel Philbrick
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Memoirs of the Second World War
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Monuments Men
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Mountain Men and Fur Traders of the Far West
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Mummy
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Omar Bradley: General at War
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On the Edge
by David D. Lee, David Horowitz, Peter N. Carroll
1st edition
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Paris 1919
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Pioneer Children on the Journey West
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Protestant Reformation
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Renaissance
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Return of George Washington
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Revolution & Regeneration
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Revolutionary Era: 1789-1850
by Charles Breunig & Matthew Levinger
3rd edition from W. W. Norton and Co.
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American History by Era Volume 3
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Roadhouse Tales
by Matilda Clark
2004 printing from Bullerville Press
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
by Eugene D. Genovese
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Rubicon
by Tom Holland
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Runaway Slaves
by John Hope Franklin
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Saints and Strangers
by George F. Wilson
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$2.00 (1 in stock)
Silent Night
by Stanley Weintraub
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Silent Night
by Stanley Weintraub
from Simon and Brown
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Six Days
by Jeremy Bowen
from Pocket Books
History for 9th-Adult
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Soul of the Lion
by Willard M. Wallace
Reprint from Stan Clark Military Books
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South in Modern America
by Dewey W. Grantham
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Such Troops as These
by Bevin Alexander
from Dutton Caliber
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Sugar and Slaves
by Richard S. Dunn, foreword by Gary B. Nash
from University of North Carolina Press
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Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
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They Marched Into Sunlight
by David Maraniss
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Truman
by David McCullough
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Twentieth Maine
by John J. Pullen
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Undaunted Courage
by Stephen Ambrose
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Union War
by Gary W. Gallagher
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