Holy CRAP this is useful! I've found it terribly hard to locate any advice for making a memory palace with kids; this may be the single most helpful guide about that on the internet.

Moreover, it's gotten my curriculum-crafting wheels spinning. I have a whole approach to structuring the history curriculum (losttools.substack.com/…), but one of its tensions is that it doesn't include any nation-specific stuff. I can imagine that memorizing the presidents at the beginning of one's education could serve as a "seed crystal" to much more knowledge of American history. (Like, when your kids learn about the Great Depression, you could help them imagine an old-timey hobo leaning on the swingset in the park across the street.)

A question for you: American presidents serve more-or-less fixed terms, so a list of presidents serves as a good "spine" for everything else. That's less true of other countries — English PMs and French présidents can last forever, or drop quickly. If one is looking for "spines" to connect more history, do you have any notions about what they might pick?