Our family publishing company, Notgrass History, publishes history from a Christian worldview. However, we didn’t actually start our company to write history curriculum. We intended to produce Bible curriculum. 

Though we didn’t realize it at the time, something one homeschooling mama said at one of the very first homeschool conventions we attended changed our focus. The year was 1999. She told us that she would like for someone to write a history of Tennessee. My husband, Ray, has a masters degree in American history and another masters in New Testament, and I have a degree in political science. We naively thought, “We could do that.” 

After months of hard work by our whole family, we published a Tennessee history in 2000. In that first history curriculum, we wrote from a Christian worldview. We included a Bible verse at the end of every lesson, and we included Bible instruction. Not long after that, Ray came to me one day and said, “I’d like to write an American history for high school. I don’t know if anyone would buy it, but I’d like to write it.” He said that he would like to include primary sources and classic literature, which was, by the way, how he learned American history when he was a junior in high school. Ray’s history and English teachers coordinated their instruction so that students could study events and literature from the same period at the same time. Ray said he would like to write his history that same way and that he would also like to add Bible instruction.

We published Ray’s Exploring America in 2002. Parents began to ask when he was going to write world history. So two years later, he wrote Exploring World History. The rest–pardon the pun–is history. Requests have continued and now we have completed nine years of history and social studies curriculum and have just three more years of curriculum to go to have 12 full years.