History
Video Lectures - Big History - The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2005, 48pp, 1st ed.
A Grand Synthesis of Knowledge - Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourses—cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history — fit together? Taught by historian David Christian, Big History offers a unique opportunity to view human history in the context of the many histories that surround it. Over the course of 48 thought-provoking lectures, he'll serve as your guide as you traverse the sweeping expanse of cosmic history—13.7 billion years of it—starting with the big bang and traveling through time and space to the present moment.
Table of contents
| 1. | What Is Big History? |
| 2. | Moving across Multiple Scales |
| 3. | Simplicity and Complexity |
| 4. | Evidence and the Nature of Science |
| 5. | Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology |
| 6. | How Did Everything Begin? |
| 7. | Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies |
| 8. | Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements |
| 9. | Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System |
| 10. | The Early Earth—A Short History |
| 11. | Plate Tectonics and the Earth's Geography |
| 12. | Threshold 5—Life |
| 13. | Darwin and Natural Selection |
| 14. | The Evidence for Natural Selection |
| 15. | The Origins of Life |
| 16. | Life on Earth—Single-celled Organisms |
| 17. | Life on Earth—Multi-celled Organisms |
| 18. | Hominines |
| 19. | Evidence on Hominine Evolution |
| 20. | Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different? |
| 21. | Homo sapiens—The First Humans |
| 22. | Paleolithic Lifeways |
| 23. | Change in the Paleolithic Era |
| 24. | Threshold 7—Agriculture |
| 25. | The Origins of Agriculture |
| 26. | The First Agrarian Societies |
| 27. | Power and Its Origins |
| 28. | Early Power Structures |
| 29. | From Villages to Cities |
| 30. | Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization |
| 31. | Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions |
| 32. | The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made |
| 33. | Long Trends—Expansion and State Power |
| 34. | Long Trends—Rates of Innovation |
| 35. | Long Trends—Disease and Malthusian Cycles |
| 36. | Comparing the World Zones |
| 37. | The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era |
| 38. | Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution |
| 39. | The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350 |
| 40. | The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700 |
| 41. | Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution |
| 42. | Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900 |
| 43. | The 20th Century |
| 44. | The World That the Modern Revolution Made |
| 45. | Human History and the Biosphere |
| 46. | The Next 100 Years |
| 47. | The Next Millennium and the Remote Future |
| 48. | Big History—Humans in the Cosmos |