The Two Cities In development

What it will teach

Augustine saw two cities running through all of history, built by two loves, mixed together until the end. The Two Cities takes his frame and reads the history of the world and of America through it, as a story with a Providence behind it.

The method is the one that runs through all our curricula: the sources first. Students read long excerpts from the master historians and from the primary witnesses, joined by a connective narrative that keeps the thread. They do not read a summary of the historians. They read the historians.

The contested chapters

The Crusades, the Inquisition, Galileo, the conquest of the Americas. These chapters are usually either skipped or settled in a sentence. Here they are faced directly, with the evidence on the table, so that a student knows what happened, what the sources say, and where honest people still disagree.

The sequence

Years 1–2

World history, from Creation to the present.

Year 3

United States history, with government and economics.

Rigor

Built to support AP European History, AP U.S. History, and AP U.S. Government.

Status

In development. Sample pages and a timeline will go to the interest list first.