thumb|right|upright=1.2|A diagram of the [[Big Bang expansion according to NASA]]

thumb|right|upright=1.2|Notable events from the Big Bang to the present day depicted in a spiral layout. Every [[billion years (Ga) is represented in 90 degrees of rotation.]]

Big History is an academic discipline that examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities. It explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations. It is taught at universities often using web-based interactive presentations.

Historian David Christian has been credited with coining the term "Big History" while teaching one of the first such courses at Macquarie University. An all-encompassing study of humanity's relationship to cosmology and natural history has been pursued by scholars since the Renaissance, and the new field, Big History, continues such work.

Comparison with conventional history

Big History examines the past using numerous time scales, from the Big Bang to modernity, Courses generally do not focus on humans until one-third to halfway through,

thumb|left|Conventional history often begins with the development of [[agriculture in civilizations such as Ancient Egypt.]]

Unlike conventional history, Big History tends to go rapidly through detailed historical eras such as the Renaissance or Ancient Egypt. It draws on the latest findings from biology, Conventional history typically begins with the invention of writing, and is limited to past events relating directly to the human race. Big Historians point out that this limits study to the past 5,000 years and neglects the much longer time when humans existed on Earth. Henry Kannberg sees Big History as being a product of the Information Age, a stage in history itself following speech, writing, and printing. Big History covers the formation of the universe, stars, and galaxies, and includes the beginning of life as well as the period of several hundred thousand years when humans were hunter-gatherers. It sees the transition to civilization as a gradual one, with many causes and effects, rather than an abrupt transformation from uncivilized static cavemen to dynamic civilized farmers.</blockquote>

thumb|right|upright=1.2|Artist's depiction of the [[Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe|WMAP satellite gathering data to help scientists understand the Big Bang]]

Big History, in contrast to conventional history, has more of an interdisciplinary basis. It emphasizes long-term trends and processes rather than history-making individuals or events. The Big History narrative has also been challenged for failing to engage with the methodology of the conventional history discipline. According to historian and educator Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, Big History eschews the interpretation of texts in favor of a purely scientific approach, thus becoming "less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics."

Time scales and questions

Big History makes comparisons based on different time scales and notes similarities and differences between the human, geological, and cosmological scales. David Christian believes such "radical shifts in perspective" will yield "new insights into familiar historical problems, from the nature/nurture debate to environmental history to the fundamental nature of change itself."

Cosmic evolution

Cosmic evolution, the scientific study of universal change, is closely related to Big History (as are the allied subjects of the epic of evolution and astrobiology); some researchers regard cosmic evolution as broader than Big History, since the latter mainly examines the specific historical trek from Big Bang → Milky Way → Sun → Earth → humanity. Cosmic evolution, while fully addressing all complex systems (and not merely those that led to humans) has been taught and researched for decades, mostly by astronomers and astrophysicists. This Big-Bang-to-humankind scenario well preceded the subject that some historians began calling Big History in the 1990s. Cosmic evolution is an intellectual framework that offers a grand synthesis of the many varied changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout the history of the universe. While engaging in issues of the origins of humanity, this interdisciplinary subject attempts to unify the sciences within the entirety of natural history—a single, inclusive scientific narrative of the origin and evolution of all material things over ~14 billion years, from the origin of the universe to the present day on Earth.

The roots of the idea of cosmic evolution extend back millennia. Ancient Greek philosophers in the fifth century BCE, most notably Heraclitus, are celebrated for their reasoned claims that all things change. Early modern speculation about cosmic evolution began more than a century ago, including the broad insights of Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Lawrence Henderson. Only in the mid-20th century was the cosmic-evolutionary scenario articulated as a research paradigm to include empirical studies of galaxies, stars, planets, and life—in short, an expansive agenda that combines physical, biological, and cultural evolution. Harlow Shapley widely articulated the idea of cosmic evolution (often calling it "cosmography") in public venues at mid-century, and NASA embraced it in the late 20th century as part of its more limited astrobiology program. Carl Sagan, Eric Chaisson, Hubert Reeves, Erich Jantsch, and Preston Cloud, among others, extensively championed cosmic evolution at roughly the same time around 1980. This extremely broad subject now continues to be formulated as both a technical research program and a scientific worldview for the 21st century.

One popular collection of scholarly materials on cosmic evolution is based on teaching and research that has been underway at Harvard University since the mid-1970s.

Complexity, energy, thresholds

Cosmic evolution is a quantitative subject, whereas Big History typically is not; this is because cosmic evolution is practiced mostly by natural scientists, while Big History by social scholars. These two subjects, closely allied and overlapping, benefit from each other; cosmic evolutionists tend to treat universal history linearly, thus humankind enters their story only at the most very recent times, whereas big historians tend to stress humanity and its many cultural achievements, granting human beings a larger part of their story. People can compare and contrast these different emphases by watching two short movies portraying the Big-Bang-to-humankind narrative, one animating time linearly, and the other capturing time (actually look-back time) logarithmically; in the former, humans enter this 14-minute movie in the last second, while in the latter they appear much earlier—yet both are correct.

These different treatments of time over ~14 billion years, each with different emphases on historical content, are further clarified by noting that some cosmic evolutionists divide the whole narrative into three phases and seven epochs:

::Phases: physical evolution → biological evolution → cultural evolution

::Epochs: particulate → galactic → stellar → planetary → chemical → biological → cultural

This contrasts with the approach used by some big historians who divide the narrative into many more thresholds, as noted in the discussion at the end of this section below. Yet another telling of the Big-Bang-to-humankind story is one that emphasizes the earlier universe, particularly the growth of particles, galaxies, and large-scale cosmic structure, such as in physical cosmology.

Notable among quantitative efforts to describe cosmic evolution are Eric Chaisson's research efforts to describe the concept of energy flow through open, thermodynamic systems, including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society. The observed increase of energy rate density (energy/time/mass) among a whole host of complex systems is one useful way to explain the rise of complexity in an expanding universe that still obeys the cherished second law of thermodynamics and thus continues to accumulate net entropy. As such, ordered material systems—from buzzing bees and redwood trees to shining stars and thinking beings—are viewed as temporary, local islands of order in a vast, global sea of disorder. A recent review article, which is especially directed toward big historians, summarizes much of this empirical effort over the past decade.

One striking finding of such complexity studies is the apparently ranked order among all known material systems in the universe. Although the absolute energy in astronomical systems greatly exceeds that of humans, and although the mass densities of stars, planets, bodies, and brains are all comparable, the energy rate density for humans and modern human society are approximately a million times greater than for stars and galaxies. For example, while the Sun's luminosity is extremely high (), its mass is also extremely high (), resulting in a low radiant energy density (). Compared to stars, more energy flows through each gram of a plant's leaf during photosynthesis, and much more (nearly a million times) rushes through each gram of a human brain while thinking ().

Cosmic evolution is more than a subjective listing of subsequent events or phenomena. This inclusive scientific worldview constitutes an objective, quantitative approach toward deciphering much of what comprises organized, material nature. Its uniform, consistent philosophy of approach toward all complex systems demonstrates that the basic differences, both within and among many varied systems, are of degree, not of kind. And, in particular, it suggests that optimal ranges of energy rate density grant opportunities for the evolution of complexity; those systems able to adjust, adapt, or otherwise take advantage of such energy flows survive and prosper, while other systems adversely affected by too much or too little energy are non-randomly eliminated.

Fred Spier is foremost among those big historians who have found the concept of energy flows useful, suggesting that Big History is the rise and demise of complexity on all scales, from sub-microscopic particles to vast galaxy clusters, and not least many biological and cultural systems in between.

David Christian, in an 18-minute TED talk, described some of the basics of the Big History course. Christian describes each stage in the progression towards greater complexity as a "threshold moment" when things become more complex, but they also become more fragile and mobile.

  1. The Big Bang and the creation of the Universe about 14 billion years ago

Goldilocks conditions

thumb|right|The [[Earth is ideally located in a Goldilocks condition—being neither too close nor too distant from the Sun.]]

A theme in Big History is what has been termed Goldilocks conditions or the Goldilocks principle, which describes how "circumstances must be right for any type of complexity to form or continue to exist," as emphasized by Spier in his recent book.

Other themes

thumb|right|Big Historians use information based on scientific techniques such as [[gene mapping to learn more about the origins of humanity.]]

Advances in particular sciences such as archaeology, gene mapping, and evolutionary ecology have enabled historians to gain new insights into the early origins of humans, despite the lack of written sources. His view is that culture and biology are highly intertwined, such that cultural practices may cause human brains to be wired differently from those in different societies.

A 2021 book, Expanding Worldviews: Astrobiology, Big History and Cosmic Perspectives, edited by Ian Crawford explores links between Big History and astrobiology, and argues that both subjects have the potential to yield positive intellectual and societal benefits owing to their inherent cosmic and evolutionary perspectives.

Paleoanthropologist Brian Villmoare, in The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (2023), emphasizes that human behavior is a specific instance of animal and especially primate behavior, and follows predictable patterns inferred from primatology and animal behavior studies. The book also focuses on the Enlightenment as a notable deviation from these patterns, and the causes and consequences of this relatively recent philosophical shift.

Presentation by web-based interactive video

Big History is more likely than conventional history to be taught with interactive "video-heavy" websites without textbooks, according to one account. It was described in one account:

Educational courses

By 2002, a dozen college courses on Big History had sprung up around the world. In 2010, Dominican University of California launched the world's first Big History program to be required of all first-year students, as part of the school's general education track. This program, directed by Mojgan Behmand, includes a one-semester survey of Big History, and an interdisciplinary second-semester course exploring the Big History metanarrative through the lens of a particular discipline or subject. A course description reads:

The Dominican faculty's approach is to synthesize the disparate threads of Big History thought, in order to teach the content, develop critical thinking and writing skills, and prepare students to wrestle with the philosophical implications of the Big History metanarrative. In 2015, University of California Press published Teaching Big History, a comprehensive pedagogical guide for teaching Big History, edited by Richard B. Simon, Mojgan Behmand, and Thomas Burke, and written by the Dominican faculty.

thumb|right|Big History was once taught at the [[University of Southern Maine.]]

Barry Rodrigue, at the University of Southern Maine, established the first general education course and the first online version, which has drawn students from around the world. The University of Queensland in Australia previously required all history majors to take an undergraduate big history course entitled Global History, but in 2020 remade the course to remove its big history aspects. The University of Queensland has since taken an active stance against big history, with Associate Professor Ian Hesketh being a world-leading critic. By 2011, 50 professors around the world have offered courses. In 2012, one report suggested that Big History was being practiced as a "coherent form of research and teaching" by hundreds of academics from different disciplines..

In 2008, Christian and his colleagues began developing a course for secondary school students. The subject is a STEM course at one high school.

There are initiatives to make Big History a required standard course for university students throughout the world. An education project founded by philanthropist Bill Gates from his personal funds was launched in Australia and the United States, to offer a free online version of the course to high school students. Its headquarters is located at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, United States. Its inaugural gathering in 2012 was described as "big news" in a report in The Huffington Post.

People involved

Some notable academics involved with the concept include: of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

  • Lowell Gustafson of Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania
  • Barry Rodrigue of Symbiosis International University, Pune, India
  • Javier Collado-Ruano of Universidad Nacional de Educacion (UNAE), Azogues, Ecuador
  • Graeme Snooks of the Australian National University and the Institute of Global Dynamic Systems, Canberra, Australia.
  • Jonathan Markley of California State University, Fullerton, California
  • David Blanks of Arkansas Tech University, Russellville, Arkansas -->
  • Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College London, UK

See also

  • ; and in particular the Longue durée concept
  • Chronology of the universe
  • Cosmic Calendar
  • Timeline of the early universe
  • Timeline of the evolutionary history of life
  • Timeline of historic inventions
  • Timeline of human evolution
  • Timeline of human prehistory
  • Timeline of natural history
  • Timeline of scientific discoveries

References

Further reading

The Cosmos

  • Bally, J., and B. Reipurth. The Birth of Stars and Planets. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  • Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
  • Chaisson, Eric. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
  • Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004.
  • Delsemme, Armande. Our Cosmic Origins: From the Big Bang to the Emergence of Life and Intelligence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
  • McSween, H. Y. Stardust to Planets. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
  • Morrison, D., and T. Owen. The Planetary System. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988.
  • Primack, Joel, and Nancy Abrams. The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. New York: Penguin, 2006.
  • Taylor, S. R. Solar System Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  • Ussher, J. The Annals of the World. London: E. Tyler, for F. Crook and G. Bedell, 1658.

The Earth

  • Alvarez, Walter. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  • Cloud, P. Oasis in Space: Earth History from the Beginning. New York: Norton, 1988.
  • Condie, K. C. Earth: An Evolving System. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005.
  • Erwin, Douglas H. Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006.
  • Fortey, R. A. Earth: An Intimate History. New York: Knopf, 2004.
  • Hazen, Robert M. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. New York: Viking, 2012.
  • Lunine, J. I. Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Tarbuck, E. J., and F. K. Lutgens. Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005.
  • Ward, P., and D. Brownlee. The Life and Death of Planet Earth. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Life

  • Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Vol. 2. New York: Knopf, 2002.
  • Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2009.
  • Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
  • Smith, Cameron M., and Charles Sullivan. The Top Ten Myths about Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.
  • Weiner, Jonathan. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution for Our Time. New York: Knopf, 1994.
  • Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York and London: Liveright Publishing (division of Norton), 2012.

Human Prehistory

  • Bellwood, Peter, and Peter Hiscock. “Australians and Austronesians.” In Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 264–305.
  • Brantingham, P. J., S. L. Kuhn, and K. W. Kerry. The Early Upper Paleolithic beyond Western Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
  • Burroughs, William James. Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Deacon, Terrence W. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1997; New York: Norton, 1998.
  • Dunbar, Robin. The Human Story: A New History of Mankind's Evolution. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
  • Gazzaniga, Michael S. Human: The Science behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2008.
  • Goodall, Jane. Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
  • Hardy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
  • Klein, Richard. The Dawn of Human Culture. New York: Wiley, 2002.
  • Lewis-Williams, D. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
  • Lee, Richard. The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
  • McBrearty, Sally, and Alison S. Brooks. “The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior.” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000):453–563.
  • Markale, Jean. The Great Goddess: Reverence of the Divine Feminine from the Paleolithic to the Present. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1999.
  • Milner, George R., and W. H. Wills. “Complex Societies of North America.” In Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 678–715.
  • Moseley, Michael E., and Michael J. Hechenberger. “From Village to Empire in South America.” In Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 640–77.
  • Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 2003.
  • Ristvet, Lauren. In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
  • Scarre, Chris, ed. The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
  • Sherratt, Andrew. Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  • Stix, Gary. “Human Origins. Traces of a Distant Past.” Scientific American, July 2008, 56–63.
  • Tattersall, Ian. Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.
  • Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

The Agricultural Revolution

  • Ammerman, A. J., and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza. The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
  • Bellwood, Peter. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Oxford/Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2005.
  • Bellwood, Peter, and Colin Renfrew. Examining the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2002.
  • Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.
  • Carneiro, R. L. “A Theory on the Origin of the State.” Science 169 (1970):733–38. Catalhoyuk Research Project, Institute of Archaeology, University College London (2008). www.catalhoyuk.com/.
  • Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997.
  • Hodder, I. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American 290, no. 1 (2004):76–83.
  • Johnson, A. W., and T. Earle. The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Kenyon, Kathleen M. Digging up Jericho. London: Ernest Benn, 1957.
  • Kitch, Patrick V. The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
  • Lewis-Williams, D. “Constructing a Cosmos—Architecture, Power, and Domestication at Catalhoyuk.” Journal of Social Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2004):28–59.
  • Richerson, P., R. Boyd, and R. L. Bettinger. “Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis.” American Antiquity 66, no. 3 (July 2001):387–411.
  • Ristvet, Lauren. In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
  • Robinson, R. “Ancient DNA Indicates Farmers, Not Just Farming, Spread West.” PLoS Biology 8, no. 11 (2010):e1000535. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000535.
  • Ruddiman, William. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. * Scarre, Chris, ed. The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
  • Smith, Bruce D. The Emergence of Agriculture. New York: Scientific American Library, 1995.

Traditional Civilizations

  • Anderson, Bonnie S., and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
  • Andrea, Alfred J., and James H. Overfield. The Human Record: Sources of Global History, Vol. 1 to 1700, 4th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2008.
  • Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
  • Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times. New York: Norton, 1994.
  • Bentley, Jerry, and Herbert Zeigler. Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past. 5th ed. New York: McGrawHill, 2010.
  • Biraben, J. R. “Essai sur l’evolution du nombre des hommes.” Population 34 (1979). The Cambridge Ancient History. 14 Volumes, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
  • Brotherson, Gordon. Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas Through Their Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  • Brown, Chip. “The King Herself.” National Geographic, April 2009, 88-111.
  • Brown, Judith K. “Note on the Division of Labor by Sex.” American Anthropologist 72 (1970):1075–76.
  • Coningham, Robin. “South Asia: From Early Villages to Buddhism.” In Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
  • Benjamin, Craig. “Hungry for Han Goods? Zhang Qian and the Origins of the Silk Roads.” In M. Gervers and G. Long, Toronto Studies in Central and Inner Asia, Vol. 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 3–30.
  • Christian, David. A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
  • Davies, Nigel. Human Sacrifice in History and Today. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
  • D’Altroy, Terence N. The Incas. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
  • Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. New York: Norton, 2007.
  • Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. The World: A History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.
  • Garnsey, Peter. Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
  • Gately, Iain. Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
  • Gillmor, Frances. Flute of the Smoking Mirror: A Portrait of Nezahualcoyotl, Poet-King of the Aztecs. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.
  • Jaspers, Karl. The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
  • Johnson, Allen W., and Timothy Earle. The Evolution of Human Societies. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • Leick, Gwendolyn. Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City. London: Penguin, 2001.
  • Leon-Portilla, Miguel. Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
  • McIntosh, Jane R. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of Indus Civilization. New York: Westview, 2002.
  • McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web. New York: Norton, 2003.
  • Man, John. Atlas of the Year 1000. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2006.
  • Marcus, Joyce. Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth and History in Four Ancient Civilizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
  • Mitchell, Stephen. Gilgamesh: A New English Version. New York: Free Press, 2004.
  • Nemet-Nejat, Karen Rhea. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
  • Ristvet, Lauren. In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
  • Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. How Writing Came About: Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
  • Shaffer, Lynda. “Southernization.” Journal of World History 5, no. 1 (1994):1–21.
  • Smith, Michael E. "The Aztecs." 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
  • Strayer, Robert. Ways of the World: A Global History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2009.
  • Toner, Jerry. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009.
  • Taagepera, Rein. “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 BC.” Social Science Research 7 (1978):180–96.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The Timespace of World-Systems Analysis: A Philosophical Essay.” Historical Geography 23, nos. 1 and 2 (1995).
  • Webster, David, and Susan Toby Evans. “Mesoamerican Civilization.” In Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 594–639.
  • Weisner-Hanks, Merry E. Gender in History: New Perspectives on the Past. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
  • Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
  • Worrall, Simon. “Made in China.” National Geographic, June 2003, 112ff.

The Modern Revolution

  • Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Ansary, Tamin. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes. New York: Public Affairs, 2009.
  • Bayly, C. A. Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
  • Bin Wong, Robert. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
  • Bulliet, Richard, et al. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
  • Clossey, Luke. “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific.” Journal of Global History 1 (2006):41–58.
  • Crosby, Alfred W. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New York: Norton, 2006.
  • Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972.
  • Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
  • Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001.
  • Crutzen, Paul. "The Geology of Mankind." Nature 415 (January 3, 2002):23.
  • Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
  • Fernlund, Kevin Jon. A Big History of North America, from Montezuma to Monroe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2022.
  • Fernlund, Kevin Jon. "The Great Battle of the Books between the Cultural Evolutionists and the Cultural Relativists: from the Beginning of Infinity to the End of History" in Journal of Big History 4 (2020): 6-30.
  • Fernlund, Kevin J. "To Think Like a Star: The American West, Modern Cosmology, and Big History." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 59 (Summer 2009): 23–44.
  • Headrick, Daniel. Technology: A World History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century: 1914–1991. London: Little, Brown, 1994.
  • Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007.
  • McNeill, John. Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.
  • McNeill, William H. The Shape of European History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
  • Maddison, Angus. The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: OECD, 2001.
  • Marks, Robert. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
  • Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
  • Northrup, David. "Globalization and the Great Convergence." Journal of World History 16, no. 3 (September 2005):249–67.
  • Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
  • Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy: 1400 to the Present. 2nd ed. Armonk, ME: Sharpe, 2006.
  • Richards, John. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
  • Ringrose, David. Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–1700. New York: Longman, 2001.
  • Ruddiman, William. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
  • Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
  • Strayer, Robert W. Ways of the World: A Brief Global History, 2 vols. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.
  • Tignor, Robert, et al. Worlds Together: Worlds Apart. 2nd ed., Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 2008.
  • Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

The Future

  • Brown, Lester R. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York and London: Norton, 2009.
  • Davidson, Eric A. You Can't Eat GNP: Economics as If Ecology Mattered. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000.
  • Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005.
  • Kaku, Michio. Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century. Oxford, New York, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
  • Korten, David. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006.
  • Kurzweill, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin, 2006.
  • Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
  • McAnany, Patricia A., and Norman Yoffee. Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Miller, Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam, 1997. Originally published 1959.
  • Mueller, Richard A. Physics for Future Presidents: The Science behind the Headlines. New York and London: Norton, 2008.
  • Prantzos, Nikos. Our Cosmic Future: Humanity's Fate in the Universe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Roberts, Paul. The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
  • Roston, Eric. The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat. New York: Walker, 2008.
  • Sachs, Jeffrey D. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York: Penguin, 2008.
  • Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
  • Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005.
  • Smil, Vaclav. Energy in World History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
  • Stableford, Brian, and David Langford. The Third Millennium: A History of the World, AD 2000–3000. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985.
  • Wagar, Warren. A Short History of the Future. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
  • ChronoZoom website
  • Teaching & Researching Big History: Exploring a New Scholarly Field, International Big History Association, 2014.
  • Cosmic evolution website, a multi-media web site with many video/animation interactive features for both introductory learners and technical experts
  • Official website for the International Big History Association
  • Big History Site website, multilingual
  • Co-evolution in Big History - a transdisciplinary and biomimetic introduction to the Sustainable Development Goals.