Historical leaders are often BIG personalities. Consider what it takes to run a country or head a movement! Wisdom? Power? Read about leaders from all over the world, the good and the bad, such as Hatshepsut, Cyrus the Great, Suleyman the Magnificent, Vlad the Impaler, Mad Ibrahim, and Queen Ranavalona the Cruel and more than 20 others. What an interesting addition to your home history library! Have a globe or atlas handy as you read and make connections. This would be a great addition to a unit study as well.
This fun, quirky, and engaging fully illustrated history anthology features twenty-five amazing and terrifying rulers for middle grade readers to discover.
We've heard of Alexander the Great. We've heard of Ivan the Terrible. But what was so Great about Alexander? What was so Terrible about Ivan? Spanning centuries of history in a culturally diverse framework-from ancient India to nineteenth-century Hawaii, and with a balanced focus on notorious women rulers as well as male, The Great and the Terrible takes a humorous look at some of the most glorious and notorious figures in history through the lens of the nicknames they're remembered by.
While some of the characters mentioned here are more prominent in world history (Cyrus the Great introduced the world's first human rights charter), others are well known only within their own cultures. The Great and the Terrible gives middle-grade readers an opportunity to dip into the breadth of world history, sampling its cultural diversity and its stranger-than-fiction historical exploits, with a mix of the sensational and the serious. It helps to correct the imbalance in many history books that currently only focus on Western Civilization, shining the spotlight on achievements (and foibles) in many different cultures.
