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

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Overview

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Journey deeply into the ever-evolving story—the history of everything—in its monumental entirety from the moment the Universe grew from the beginning of the universe to the modern day.

Syllabus

  • 01: What Is Big History?
  • 02: Moving across Multiple Scales
  • 03: Simplicity and Complexity
  • 04: Evidence and the Nature of Science
  • 05: Threshold 1: Origins of Big Bang Cosmology
  • 06: How Did Everything Begin?
  • 07: Threshold 2: The First Stars and Galaxies
  • 08: Threshold 3: Making Chemical Elements
  • 09: 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
  • By This Professor

Taught by

David Christian

Reviews

4.5 rating at The Great Courses Plus based on 257 ratings

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