Reading history with a young child is plus/minus. On the one hand, we've read many books about people in historic settings. On the other hand, well, there's probably lots of things that very young children just won't understand or won't be interested in. This isn't the place I go to first, but if it relates to something else we're reading it can be really great. Also, books with lots of pictures and lots of text boxes (rather than paragraph after paragraph of text), like the DK eyewitness books, can let your reader expand his/her knowledge at his or her own pace. A word of warning--if you do go for the Renaissance, remember they were very into the study of the human body (i.e. naked people). My youngest is still in diapers, so naked people is sort of an everyday occurrence here, but it might not in your house, so just be aware!
Biography is very tricky. At this age, I would probably shy away from most biography, simply because
most people who become important enough for a biography are grown ups by the
time they are that important and grown ups deal with a lot of grown up issues
that are not appropriate for young kids to be exposed to. This is especially true of biographies that
are "thick" enough to be challenging.
Even picture books can contain material that may not be suitable for
very young children, especially if they are going to read unsupervised. I am
not saying biography is a bad genre, even for this age group, its just not the kind of thing you can pull of the shelf and say its fine. You've got to really read it through and some of us don't have time to do that before the book is read (i.e. on the way home from the library!).
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