Big Spiral History, Year 1

Also, looking for your help in committing a murder

Starting on September 7, our little conspiracy will be launching the first piece of our overarching Egan education: Big Spiral History, Year 1. In brief:

Big Spiral History, Year 1 is 144 carefully-chosen events from big history, told as compelling stories, that become part of a living timeline.

Throughout the 2026–27 school year, families will get a story a day (from Monday–Thursday) dropped into their inboxes. The stories are super-short videos (just 3–5 minutes) that are scripted and performed to snag your emotions and worm their way into your memories.

You’ll get an icon (a little square picture) representing each story, and put it up on the walls throughout your home. Together, the icons will make a living timeline — a sort of memory palace — that winds its way through your home.

In the first week, we’ll help you create that timeline. On Fridays, we’ll give you little assignments that help you secure what you’ve learned in your long-term memory.

By the end of the year, you’ll have planted a vision of the history of everything, from the Big Bang to LLMs, into the heads of everyone in your household.

Behold!

You can sign up for it right now at schoolsforhumans.com/history. We have a rather practical Q&A about it there. Here, I want to talk about the big ideas behind it. (I’d also like your help in committing a murder… but I’ll hold that to the end.)

Imaginary Interlocutor: Back in spring, you blogged about the elementary, middle, and high school history curriculum you’re building. Is this the same thing?

It’s the first stage of that, but with some big changes.

First, it’s for all ages. The original plan was to make it primarily for elementary schoolers, but we’ve designed these to include a wider age range: elementary schoolers ages 8 and up, younger kids with some parental help, and adults. You don’t even need to be a teacher or homeschooler to do it. (We’re excited about this, because we can make this for whole families.)

Second, we’re making it easy. This is in response to all the people who gave us diverse feedback like “this is hard” and “why is this so hard?” and “you know most of us don’t have history degrees, right?” We’ve chosen the 144 stories ourselves, and are scripting each of them as a quick, compelling performance. (We’re excited about this, because we can make the stories accessible.)

Third, we’re making it go fast. Originally, we suggested that people do one story a week over four years. We realized that while this might be perfect in a school context, in any other context, it was too slow.Who has the ability to commit to anything for four years? At the rate of four stories a week, we can cover everything in a single year. (We’re excited about this, because we can make the experience compact.)

I.I.: Is this basically just a bunch of stories?

Honestly, if that was all this was, it’d actually still be an achievement — so many history curriculums don’t seem to know what a “story” is. But the small stories become part of the big picture of life, the universe, and everything as they enter your living timeline. You won’t just hear the stories, you’ll plant them in your head, where all sorts of great stuff can grow.

I.I.: Why 144?

There are about 180 days in a school year, but we’re only creating videos for the first four days of the week, and ⅘ of 180 is 144. (There are other considerations, but they’re too geeky for a respectable post to have in its main text.¹)

I.I.: What are the odds that my family actually remembers all these stories, long-term?

Pretty high, because we’ve built the entire course around how human memory actually works —

• stories: everything is a short, evocative story

• vivid images: for each story, you’ll get a printable icon — a small square picture

• locations: you’ll put up the icons onto your walls in chronological order to make a living timeline

• songs: at the end of the year, you’ll turn your whole timeline into a song

And, well, of course, repetition: throughout the year you’ll float through your living timeline (in your mind) to remember the order of the stories. You’ll also play little games to connect stories that are related to each other.

I’ve taken lots of fascinating history courses from which I’ve later forgotten nearly everything. We’re hell-bent on saving you from this fate. Our goal is to help you effect a sort of intellectual transformation for your household — we want this to be the start of you seeing everything in terms of history. (And of falling in love with history to boot.)

I.I.: Must we put up these icons? They sound clutter-y.

We’re making them small, but in any case they’re optional — your family could jump straight to imagining the images inside your heads. You will want, however, to put up tiny stickers whose 🔴 rainbow 🟠 colors 🟡 help 🟢 you 🔵 recall 🟣 different 🩷 eras.²

I.I.: How can I know that these stories will be any good?

We’re working with the actor and dramaturg Emma Baker to script and perform these stories in ways that bring out the human experiences inside them. Keep reading to see our process for it. We’re working on the first examples; once those are done, you won’t have to take our word for it.

I.I.: How much does it cost?

We’re investing a lot of resources into making this, but we’re selling access to the entire year — which is to say, 144 stories from across all history — at $144. (That’s actually in the realm of what a lot of homeschooling families pay for a year of history.)

I.I.: What are these 144 stories?

They’re a diverse set — horrible rulers, brilliant activists, pirates, the first stars, Vikings, cruel explorers, massacre upon massacre, religious reformers, dinosaurs… There’s a lot of old favorites in there:

• Ann Frank (🩷 space 19, dot 5)

• Judas Maccabee’s Rebellion (🟢 space 7, dot 4)

• Joan of Arc (🔵 space 10, dot 4)

And there are some gems you might not be familiar with. Have you heard about Potosí, the mountain of misery (🟣 space 11, dot 5)? How about the princess–priestess Enheduanna, the earliest known named author (🟡 space 5, dot 3)?

You can see them all here, along with a one-sentence description of each:

I.I.: How’d you pick them?

With fear and trembling and a bucket to collect all our sweat.

Foolishly, I had thought choosing the stories was going to be easy! After all, I’ve been preparing for this my entire adult life: I have a bachelor’s in history. I have a half-wall of history books in my home. I developed this very idea into my master’s thesis, which I presented at a history conference.³ I figured that because it’s impossible to get a “perfect” list of history stories, we could embrace imperfection. I guessed we’d hash this out in a couple days.

That was months ago. To oversimplify a painful and convoluted process, we knew each story needed to work on three levels:

1. a vivid, simple story (🧙‍♂️MYTHIC understanding)

2. a window into one of history’s huge, complex narratives (🦹‍♂️ROMANTIC understanding)

3. a cage where students could have an idea fight (👩‍🔬PHILOSOPHIC understanding)⁴

So we set about winnowing through the famous stories from world history to find the ones that worked as each. Let’s start with the 🧙‍♂️MYTHIC.

I.I.: How do you know these events will be mythically engaging?

Well, we made sure to put in historical figures that already live in the imaginations of most people: think mummies, ninjas, pirates, cavemen, and knights. But beyond that, we made sure that everything we chose is rich in the stuff that makes any story great.

We start by putting the agony back in protagonist — we center the story on a person who needs something. This desire should be one of the big binaries of human struggle: say, poverty/wealth, oppression/equality, destruction/salvation, or ignorance/insight. And by the end of the story, something needs to have happened — the world and the protagonist should be changed in some way.

I.I.: That sounds like a template: does that mean that the stories will sound repetitive?

Oh no. These stories are richly detailed, and crafted capture 144 very different historical moments. But we’re going to further diversify these by telling them in different genres: the rise of Caesar Augustus can be scripted as a thriller; Equiano’s account of being kidnapped may become true crime. Confucius’ attempt to remake his world can be political intrigue; the story of Fūma Kotarō is easy to tell as a heist. We’re considering a famous 20th century story for gothic horror (see if you can guess it in the comments). We think that one will be a murder mystery.

This all makes sure that these stories work on the 🧙‍♂️MYTHIC level. How they work on the 🦹‍♂️ROMANTIC level is something that flows from a very different question…

I.I.: Are these stories important?

Very much so! Remember that this is Big Spiral History: we’re creating our whole history curriculum to revisit the same stories again and again.

The thrust of this first cycle is to stack up simple stories to make a timeline of Big History. The thrust of the second cycle will be to see how these simple stories weave together into the many complex narratives that make a popular history of the world. A simple way of thinking about that is to ask, “what would a history teacher say are the most important things in all of history?”

I.I.: Oy… what are the most important things in all of history?

While there isn’t any single agreed-upon list, there are quite a few attempts. We decided to see where they overlapped. We (and here I of course mean “an LLM”) identified nine of these lists. They included sources like Encyclopedia Britannica, the International Baccalaureate history syllabus, the World History Encyclopedia’s timeline, and UCLA’s ambitious World History for Us All. We found nine such lists, compared them, and gave each a score. Some topics (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis) only scored a 5/9. Others (e.g. the Holocaust) scored a full 9/9.

We took all the topics that scored at least a 7/9, and ran them through a special list — Wikipedia’s Vital Articles. It’s essentially a crowd-sourced canon of the world’s most important topics. It comes in tiers:

• Level 1: the 10 most important subjects

• Level 2: the 100 most important subjects

• Level 3: the 1,000

• Level 4: the 10,000

• Level 5: the 50,000

We found that while there were historical topics in the first two levels, none could be made into a 🧙‍♂️MYTHIC story. (Level 1, for example, has “human history”, and Level 2 has “prehistory”, “ancient history”, “post-classical history”, and so on. Good stuff, important stuff — but not 🧙‍♂️MYTHIC stuff.)

Level 3 was where we hit pay dirt. It featured 27 of the stories we were already considering; we decided that, come hell or high water, we were going to include those. Level 4 featured 41 more stories and Level 5 had 17 more; we decided to shoot for including most of those.

Some took some ingenuity — we knew we needed to include the Black Death (it scored a 9/9 and was a Vital Article level 3), so we tied it to the story of the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun’s watching his teachers and parents die (🔵 space 10, dot 4). We needed to include a window to the mass migration of Europeans in the late 1800s, so we chose the arrival of Emma Goldman in New York City (🩷 space 18, dot 4).

In the end, we’re quite happy with how many of “the most important things” we were able to include in our 144 stories. Most of the chapters you’d find in a history textbook — topics like “the seven cradles of civilization”, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the decolonization movement — have anchors in our list.

But again, nothing’s perfect. You can take a look at the concordance document here, and use it to berate us on what we’ve missed.

I.I.: You call this “Year 1”. What’s “Year 2”?

Big Spiral History is just getting started.

Before long, we’re going to throw ourselves into creating the 🦹‍♂️ROMANTIC and 👩‍🔬PHILOSOPHIC cycles of world history. (To get a glimpse of what we think that’ll look like, see my posts on middle school and high school history… though you can expect those to evolve quite a lot.)

Before that, we’re planning to create some 🧙‍♂️MYTHIC, national history add-ons to Year 1. In the U.S., at least, most homeschoolers are required to study American history, and we believe this model can be an amazing way to do it. At the same time we do this, we’d like to start working with people to develop some other national histories, too.

But even before that, in the 2027–28 school year we’ll fine-tune what we’re making this year, and turn it into a respectable consumer-oriented product. You can get it now, in its untamed, wild pilot year now!

Anyhoo, this all flows from a 🦹‍♂️ROMANTIC view of history. What we do for the 👩‍🔬PHILOSOPHIC level is something that flows from a very different question…

I.I.: What attention did you give to gender? To race? To religion? To class?

Well: lots. To show it off, we need to take a look at our 👩‍🔬PHILOSOPHIC cycle, which we will eventually build for high schoolers. It’ll be a baptism into the (many) theories that intellectuals use to make sense of how human society ticks. This means that we’ll center it on the tools of 👩‍🔬BIG QUESTIONS, 👩‍🔬GENERAL THEORIES, and 👩‍🔬IDEA FIGHTS.

But this is a bigger topic than I can answer here. Look forward to a follow-up in a later post.

I.I.: I believe you said you’d like help murdering someone?

If you count through the 144 stories carefully, you’ll find that there aren’t actually one hundred forty-four of them — there are one hundred forty-five.

We’ve already worked danged hard to whittle these down. Everything in the current list is either so important or such a great stand-alone story that we can’t imagine denying it.

We need to knock out another one, but we can’t bear to choose which… so we’d like you to do the dirty deed for us!

On Sunday, August 30, at 6pm Eastern / 3pm Pacific, I’ll hold a live meeting for paid subscribers. In it, I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at the list of stories, and tell you some things that excite me about it. I’ll answer any questions you have (including rude ones that start with “How dare you not include…”). You can come with any suggestions you have about which story to kill. To start, here are some that we’re considering giving the ax:

• rice cultivation in Hemudu (space 4, dot 5)

• Ötzi the Iceman… dies (space 5, dot 2)

• Hannibal crosses the Alps (space 7, dot 3)

• Gutenberg invents the printing press (space 10, dot 5)

• the Haitian Revolution (space 16, dot 5)

• Princess Isabel ends slavery in Brazil (space 18, dot 4)

• creation of the State of Israel (space 19, dot 5)

• Rachel Carson writes Silent Spring (space 20, dot 2)

• Tim Berners-Lee gives away the World Wide Web (space 20, dot 5)

• the January 6 Capitol attack (space 21, dot 3)

I’ll lead us in a conversation about the ways each story is load-bearing (sometimes in unexpected ways). By the end of the hour, we’ll have decided which story to kill, and we’ll have arrived at the sensible, excellent, magical number of 144.

Here’s the link —

In the meantime, you can AMA about Big Spiral History, Year 1 in the comments, and you can sign up for it here.

1. 144 is a pretty cool number! It’s a dozen dozens, commonly called a “gross” (literally, a “big”). Because of that, it pops up quite a bit across world cultures. It’s the number of tiles in a game of Mahjong. It’s the height (in cubits) of the walls of Revelation’s city of New Jerusalem. It’s the number of people Bilbo invited to his going-away party.

2. Turns out there’s no “pink dot” emoji.

3. The International Big History Association’s inaugural meeting. Walter Alvarez, the guy who flippin’ discovered what killed the dinosaurs, was in the audience. All in all, quite a way to spend a thirtieth birthday.

4. What do these weird emoji mean?