Guest Hollow’s Whirlwind World History Curriculum Online Textbook

Guest Hollow's Whirlwind World History Curriculum Textbook

Are you ready to learn world history?

Get ready to learn about world history in this absolutely FREE book! Why are we offering a free book? Have a look at our About Us page, and you’ll get a sense of who we are and why we care about homeschoolers like we do. Having said that, please consider using Guest Hollow, LLC as your source for other curriculums and materials. Despite being a tiny mom-and-pop, our company has a lot to offer, and it’s growing all the time. Please explore our site as well as our social media presence and let us know what you think!

This FREE book is designed to be used with Guest Hollow’s Whirlwind World History Curriculum, but anyone is free to use it. 

Reading tip: When reading the online textbook, you can click on some of the images to see them larger. This may be useful when you want to see the details on maps! Also, don’t forget that most browsers will allow you to increase the font size of the page you are reading (if that’s something you need to make the reading more comfortable). 🙂

Welcome to the Whirlwind World History online textbook! We used the word “whirlwind” because there is a LOT of material to cover, and we’re going to whip through it at a quick pace in Guest Hollow’s Whirlwind World History Curriculum! Think of this as an “overview” of world events – a year-long trip through thousands of years across the globe.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is greek-and-latin-roots.jpg
Keep an eye out for the Greek and Latin root word sections to learn some vocabulary as you read!

Note: Individual pages are listed in bold. Titles with a star are sections on a single page. Topics are listed for easier reference.

Video tip: You can change the speed of YouTube videos. You can click settings on the YouTube video player and pick a faster playback speed up to 2x the speed. I watched a lot of the longer informational videos at this speed with no loss in understanding or retention. You may want to try it as well if you are short on time and if you can process the audio at a faster speed. 😉

This text was adapted (with permission) from:

  • Western Civilization: A Concise History – Volumes 1-3
    by Dr. Christopher Brooks
    CC BY-NC-SA
  • World History Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500
    by Eugene Berger, Ph.D, George L. Israel, Ph.D., Charlotte Miller, Ph.D., Brian Parkinson, Ph.D., Andrew Reeves, Ph.D, and Nadejda Williams, Ph.D.
    CC BY-SA
  • Modern World History
    by Dan Allosso, Bemidji State University and Tom Williford, Southwest Minnesota State University
    CC BY-NC-SA

I’ve taken excerpts from the above-mentioned resources and heavily edited and added to them for my intended audience. While I’ve received permission to use/adapt these books, none of the above endorses Guest Hollow or my use of their materials.

Information was also taken from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and other resources (listed in the individual page credits).

This online book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Beowulf the Fox Terrier dog and the Greek & Latin roots graphic © Jennifer Guest

8 thoughts on “Guest Hollow’s Whirlwind World History Curriculum Online Textbook

  1. will the curriculum be for elementary, middle school or highschool?

    1. It’s going to be for high school, possibly adaptable for middle school (although I haven’t decided 100% about that yet). 🙂

  2. This is wonderful!
    Any update on a release date?

    We are doing your Geography program and this qould flow perfectly for 10th grade.

    1. Thank you so much for the compliment! 🙂 I’m not making any promises, but I’m hoping it will be ready early next year (2022). Life has a way of throwing surprises our way, though, so I DON’T have a release date…but the schedule is finished. I’m just creating the workbook now!

  3. We are so enjoying Whirlwind History (planning on purchasing more GH). I was wondering if we decided to use this for 9th and 10th grade…. where should we stop?

    1. I’m so glad you are enjoying the curriculum! Week 18 is halfway through, so you could stop there if you want to spread it out over 2 years. 🙂 You may want to ask your question in our FB geography group. I know some of the group members have split it into 2 years, so you could see how they did it:
      https://www.facebook.com/groups/GuestHollow.Geography.homeschool/

  4. Hi there. I am looking into purchasing your curriculum for 7th and 8th grade – I am wondering if you have any helpful tips to modify it down. You cover what is needed for the middle school requirements but there are some chunks I will not need to introduce. Do you know if other buyers have been able to cover world history in one year with this curriculum? I rotate my year A (american history/civics) and year B (world history). Thank you!

    1. Yes, Whirlwind is designed to be used over 36 weeks – lots of customers have used it over one year with no issues. 🙂 As for paring it down, when you make the purchase, you get a booklist that ranks the books in order of importance. That can help you cull some books. Also, we design our curricula to be really flexible, so if there is something you don’t need to cover, you can easily pull it out. We provide a Microsoft Word document version of the schedule that you can change to suit your needs/wants. 🙂 You can think of the curriculum schedule like a buffet and pick-and-choose what works best for your student(s). If you have any other questions, we are always just an email away!

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