bel, what you said: present history as a list rather than a story is perfect--that is exactly what was wrong with the history textbooks I had. Ho hum, another battle, yeah yeah...
Helen, I was quite interested in reading about your learning style! Once you saw the whole, all the parts fell into place for you. I never had much trouble seeing the whole, but--it was full of gaps, because I could remember so little about the parts.
Instead of "In 1350, King X's troops defeated Y", why can't someone write a textbook that reads more like, "King X, who came to the throne at the tender age of 14, was married to a woman who he never came to love: it had been a marriage arranged long ago, and it was a marriage for politics, not love. Though he was quite wealthy by the standards of the day, he often found himself thirsty: the summer of 1350 had been one long draught. The draught had made the peasants who worked for the king very uncomfortable--and worried. They worried about how they would pay their taxes, and it wasn't long until some of them were saying that the taxes were unfair anyway. The king's chief adviser was a troublemaker named Y--he knew that if something happened to the boy king, his cousin would become king, and then Y would have real control, because his cousin was a trusting simpleton. So he insisted to the king that the peasants would calm down after they saw that the tax hadn't bankrupted them..." Here you have: something personal to make this particular king more memorable; a painless way of establishing (and remembering!) what year it was, as well as a hint about what caused the Peasant Rebellion of 1350. Plus a way to continue into the future. (FTR, this was not meant to be an example of good writing, and certainly not for all grade levels; it was just to try and make a point.)
