• Revised & Updated 2025!

• Develops literacy, vocabulary, geography, politics!

• Introduces & explores key ideas in history!

• Explores World History!

• Explores the growth of nationalism!

• Explores major artists of the period, and their works!

• Covers major people & events in the order they happened!

• Hands-on activities make history relevant to the student!

• Develops critical thinking skills!

• Develops study in a self-determined manner!

• Lesson plans are complete and ready to use!  Start now!

We're currently working our way through this program and loving it.  The children (aged 12 and 16) work independently on most of their subjects, but we chose to do this together to tie in with this year's Great Books studies. As we started with The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian start to this unit worked perfectly.

This program has been designed for independent study, but we've found it to be ideal for collaborative learning, encouraging interesting discussions. All the hard work has been done, but there is plenty of scope for shaping it to your family's needs. If necessary the children can work on their own too, so I love the freedom this gives us.  Highly recommended.  E. R., Professional Educator
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For history students ages 11-adult. A detailed tale of the changes that embraced the world in the 1800-1900s. The American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, England's expansion into a global empire...the period of time when our modern world took on much of its current appearance.  

A period of enormous cultural development, as well.  The great art of Mozart, Beethoven, Monet, Renoir, Poe. The spectacular rise and fall of Napoleon! It's all here for the Step 4 (ages 11-adult) student.  (Many of the required film and written resources are freely available on the Internet.  Some may need to be secured.)

Utilizing Steps unique, remarkable techniques, history is presented as an integrated experience, just as it is experienced in life! History, art, religion, science, politics, economics...all of the important forces are investigated as they appear in the parade of history. A major course, 120-140 hours to complete.

Concepts presented in this course include:

• The development of nations in Europe

• Nations fighting other nations for supremacy

• The Age of Reason

• Francis Bacon

• Isaac Newton

• John Locke

• Voltaire

• Rousseau

• The Science of economics and Adam Smith

• The French Revolution

• The Declaration of the Rights of Man

• King Louis XVI and family are killed by the revolutionaries

• Napoleon

• France after Napoleon

• The Dreyfus Affair

• French Literature

• Emile Zola

• Victor Hugo

• Balzac

• The invention of Science Fiction and Jules Verne

• French painters of the Romantic period

• Jacques-Louis David

• Delacroix

• Daumier

• Corot

• Impressionism in French Art

• Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Cassatt, Manet, Morisot

• Pointillism and Georges Seurat

• Gaugin

• Van Gogh

• Vuillard

• Rodin

• French Music

• Debussy

• Ravel

• The Industrial Revolution

• Inventions of the 1800s and their inventors

• Henry Ford, the automobile and the assembly line

• Darwin and the Theory of Evolution (a single lesson if you object and wish to skip it.)

• Louis Pasteur

• Edison and his many inventions

• The Wright Brothers and the airplane

• H.G. Wells

• The growth of Great Britain into the British Empire under Victoria

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes

• Dickens

• The growth of Prussian (German) and Austrian power in Europe in the 1800s

• British Theater

• Emperor Franz Joseph

• Oscar Wilde

• Bismarck

• George Bernard Shaw

• Karl Marx and Communism

• Gilbert and Sullivan

• Hegel

• Rudyard Kipling

• Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II

• William Thackery

• German literature in the 1800s

• Jane Austen

• Goethe

• Schiller

• Mozart

• Beethoven

• Richard Wagner

• Johann Strauss II

• Brahms

• Italy in the 1800s

• The Catholic Church in the 1800s

• Italian Grand opera

• Rossini

• Bellini

• Donizetti

• Verdi

• Puccini

• Poland in the 1800s

• Chopin

• Henrik Ibsen creates the modern problem play

• Russia under its Czars tries to modernize during the 1800s

• Russian Literature

• Dostoyevsky

• Tolstoy

• Pushkin

• Gogol

• Anton Chekhov

• Russian Composers

• Mussorgsky

• Tchaikovsky

• The Balkans in the 1800s

• The Ottoman Empire

• The United States and Manifest Destiny

• The Louisiana Purchase

• The Oregon Trail

• The Alamo

• The "Wild West"

• Slavery in America

• The American Civil War

• Abraham Lincoln

• The Monroe Doctrine

• American Literature and Art

• Twain

• Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Poe

• Whitman

• Dickinson

• Thoreau

• Emerson

• Africa in the 1800s

• Cecil Rhodes

• Australia, Canada, India as a part of the British Empire

• Southeast Asia in the 1800s

• China slowly opens to the west

• The Opium Trade

• Japan opens to the west

• Revolutions in South and Central America led by Bolivar and San Martin free those countries from Spain

• Zapata
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  Required materials (Some are provided in the course):
  
  Books:
  A Tale of Two Cities
  Huckleberry Finn
  
  Films:
         Topsy-Turvy
         The Man Who Would Be King
         Fiddler On The Roof
         The Cherry Orchard
         The Alamo
         How The West Was Won
         Amistad