Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

290 Pages·2012·5.4 MB·English

by  David Christian

Subtopic
Topic Civilization
“Pure intellectual stimulation that can be popped into
History & Culture
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—Harvard Magazine
B Big History:
“Passionate, erudite, living legend lecturers. Academia’s
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best lecturers are being captured on tape.”
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—The Los Angeles Times i The Big Bang, Life on Earth,
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“A serious force in American education.” ry
and the Rise of Humanity
—The Wall Street Journal
Course Guidebook
Professor David Christian
San Diego State University
Professor David Christian, formerly Professor of History
at San Diego State University, is one of the pioneers of the
field of big history. Currently he is Professor of History at
Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author
of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, which won
the 2005 World History Association Book Prize, and This
Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. He is coeditor
of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.
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The Teaching Company.
David Christian, D.Phil.
Professor of History
San Diego State University
P
rofessor David Christian is Professor of
History at San Diego State University,
where he teaches courses on big history,
world environmental history, Russian history, and
the history of Inner Eurasia. From 1975 to 2000,
he taught Russian history, European history, and world history at Macquarie
University in Sydney.
Professor Christian was born in New York and grew up in Nigeria and
Britain. He completed his B.A. in History at Oxford University, his M.A.
in Russian History at The University of Western Ontario, and his D.Phil. in
19th-Century Russian History at Oxford University. As a graduate student, he
spent a year in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during the Brezhnev era.
In the late 1980s, Professor Christian developed an interest in understanding
the past on very large scales. With the help of colleagues in astronomy,
geology, biology, anthropology, and prehistory, he began an experimental
history course that started with the origins of the Universe and ended in the
present day. Within two years, after his students persuaded him that it was a
shame not to deal with the future after studying 13 billion years of history in
13 weeks, he introduced a (cid:191) nal lecture on prospects for the future. In 1992,
he wrote an article describing this approach as “big history.” The label seems
to have stuck, as similar courses have independently appeared elsewhere, and
there are now several courses in big history at European, Russian, Australian,
and North American universities.
In addition, Professor Christian has written on the social and material history
of 19th-century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role
of alcohol. In 1990, he completed a study of the role of vodka in Russian
social, political, and economic life. Professor Christian’s recent publications
include: Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of
i
Modernity (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1997); A History of Russia, Central Asia
and Mongolia, Vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire
in The Blackwell History of the World (Blackwell, 1998); Maps of Time: An
Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004), which
won the 2005 World History Association Book Prize and has been translated
into Spanish and Chinese; and This Fleeting World: A Short History of
Humanity (Berkshire Publishing, 2007).
Professor Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.
He is Af(cid:191) liates Chair for the World History Association and was one of the
editors of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. He also participated
in the creation of the world history website World History for Us All (http://
worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm). (cid:374)
ii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LLEECCTTUURREE GGUUIIDDEESS
LECTURE 1
What Is Big History? ...........................................................................5
LECTURE 2
Moving across Multiple Scales .........................................................10
LECTURE 3
Simplicity and Complexity.................................................................14
LECTURE 4
Evidence and the Nature of Science ................................................19
LECTURE 5
Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology ................................23
LECTURE 6
How Did Everything Begin? ..............................................................28
LECTURE 7
Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies ....................................32
LECTURE 8
Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements .......................................37
LECTURE 9
Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System ................................41
LECTURE 10
The Early Earth—A Short History .....................................................45
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 11
Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography .....................................49
LECTURE 12
Threshold 5—Life .............................................................................54
LECTURE 13
Darwin and Natural Selection ...........................................................59
LECTURE 14
The Evidence for Natural Selection ..................................................63
LECTURE 15
The Origins of Life ............................................................................67
LECTURE 16
Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms...........................................72
LECTURE 17
Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms .............................................76
LECTURE 18
Hominines.........................................................................................81
LECTURE 19
Evidence on Hominine Evolution ......................................................85
LECTURE 20
Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different? ................................89
LECTURE 21
Homo sapiens—The First Humans ..................................................94
LECTURE 22
Paleolithic Lifeways ..........................................................................99
LECTURE 23
Change in the Paleolithic Era .........................................................103
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 24
Threshold 7—Agriculture ................................................................108
LECTURE 25
The Origins of Agriculture ...............................................................113
LECTURE 26
The First Agrarian Societies ...........................................................118
LECTURE 27
Power and Its Origins .....................................................................123
LECTURE 28
Early Power Structures ...................................................................127
LECTURE 29
From Villages to Cities ....................................................................132
LECTURE 30
Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization...........................................137
LECTURE 31
Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions ..........................................142
LECTURE 32
The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made ..................................146
LECTURE 33
Long Trends—Expansion and State Power....................................150
LECTURE 34
Long Trends—Rates of Innovation .................................................155
LECTURE 35
Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles ..............................160
LECTURE 36
Comparing the World Zones ...........................................................165
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 37
The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era..........................................170
LECTURE 38
Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution............................................175
LECTURE 39
The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350....................................180
LECTURE 40
The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700 .............................................185
LECTURE 41
Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution.......................................189
LECTURE 42
Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900 ...................................194
LECTURE 43
The 20th Century .............................................................................199
LECTURE 44
The World That the Modern Revolution Made ................................204
LECTURE 45
Human History and the Biosphere..................................................209
LECTURE 46
The Next 100 Years ........................................................................214
LECTURE 47
The Next Millennium and the Remote Future .................................219
LECTURE 48
Big History—Humans in the Cosmos .............................................223
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Table of Contents
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Timeline 1—The Scale of the Cosmos ...........................................228
Timeline 2—The Scale of the Earth ................................................229
Timeline 3—The Scale of Multi-cellular Organisms ........................230
Timeline 4—The Scale of Mammalian Evolution ............................231
Timeline 5—The Scale of Human Evolution ...................................232
Timeline 6—The Scale of Human History ......................................233
Timeline 7—The Scale of Agrarian Societies .................................234
Timeline 8—The Scale of Modernity ..............................................235
Summary Timeline ..........................................................................236
Glossary .........................................................................................240
Bibliography ....................................................................................263
Permissions Acknowledgments ......................................................279
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