Clay Burrell says history isn’t learned, but story changes that problem.

He suggests scrambling “the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout:

“Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.”

The instruction, then, to students:

“Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order. Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Burrell says that in most cases, students (high-school seniors) fare poorly with this exercise. So then he says to them:

“You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know — as a story — do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

Burrell says that “telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on” is one of his strengths.

However:

… hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it. Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher — and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.

Another twist on “history as story” is the History Engine project, which sounds like it gives students the opportunity to build narrative summaries similar to those Burrell talks about — using primary sources (but focusing on American history only):

The core of the [History Engine] project is student-written episodes — individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.