Further Reading
Notes indicate some of the books I have found most useful for particular topics. However, most works cited in the notes are recent accounts, and they do not include many classic texts that are now dated, such as H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and Carl Sagan’s wonderful Cosmos. The list below focuses mainly on books that train a wide-angle lens on the past, so it can be thought of as an introductory bibliography of works on big history and the modern origin story and books that take up some of the major themes in big history.
Books and Articles
Alvarez, Walter. A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. A personal exploration of the big history story by the geologist who showed that an asteroid did in the dinosaurs.
Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: New Press, 2012. A version of the big-history story.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Doubleday, 2003. A wonderful and highly readable account of the evolution of our modern scientific understanding of the universe.
Chaisson, Eric. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. This book explores the link between energy-density flows and increasing complexity.
Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. First published in 2004. One of the first modern attempts to tell the big-history story.
. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2008. A short history of humanity.
. “What Is Big History?” Journal of Big History 1, no. 1 (2017): 4–19, https://journalofbighistory.org/index.php/jbh.
Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014. A university textbook on big history.
Macquarie University Big History Institute. Big History. London: DK Books, 2016. A beautifully illustrated account of the big-history story.
Rodrigue, Barry, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev, eds. From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology, Vol. 1: Our Place in the Universe. Delhi: Primus Books, 2015. An anthology of essays.
Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. An ambitious attempt to tease out some of the main theoretical ideas behind big history.
Other Sources on Big History
Bill Gates has funded the creation of the Big History Project, a free, online big-history syllabus for high schools. Big history now has its own scholarly organization (the International Big History Association), and Macquarie University has established a Big History Institute to advance teaching and research in big history.
A TED Talk on big history that I gave in 2011 was designed to offer a short introduction to the idea of big history; it is available at https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.