She’s a retired southern evangelical whose interest in the Bible has sparked an interest in history. Shes a smart and tough cookie who never had the opportunity to pursue higher education, and she spent most her life as a nurses aid and mother. I really want to support this endeavor. Lots of visuals and easily digestible material would be a plus. Thanks so much for any recommendations!
See if you can find this DVD course from The Great Courses called Understanding Greek and Roman Technology by Stephen Ressler. Often libraries will stock these, or you can buy/stream it from the publisher. I watch lots of their material and this is one of the best I've seen on any topic so I had to share. Dr. Ressler was head of the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at West Point and he's a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, so I consider him trustworthy on the topic. But he's also a really engaging lecturer, he uses lots of visuals and physical models to illustrate concepts, so he's able to make a potentially dry topic pretty compelling. The whole thing is about 12 hours if she's up for it, I think she'll love it.
Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber is a fascinating and accessible read about textile manufacturing. It's one of my favorite books, period. The book looks at weaving in prehistory and early antiquity, discussing the different kinds of looms, spindles, and patterns, and shows how some of the techniques survived into the modern era. The best part is realizing how complex the designs were even in the beginning, and how skilled ancient weavers were.
Another of the Great Courses that might interest her, is The Holy Land Revealed, where archeologist Dr Jodi Magness discusses the physical evidence at Jerusalem and the surrounding lands.
Granted, my church is very non-Evangelical. We watched this for Adult Christian Education one year.
Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably, OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted a non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.
I suggest "Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture". Vitruvius was a Roman architect of about the first century BC, just before the time of Christ. He wrote a book on architecture dedicated to Caesar Augustus. Translations are available.
I don't know your Gram's reading level but it comes from "the horse's mouth". An illustrated edition might be helpful.