Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity (Great Courses, No. 8050)
While you may have heard parts of this story before in courses on geology, history, anthropology, biology, cosmology, and other scholarly disciplines, Big History provides more than just a recap. This course will expand the scope of your perspective on the past and alter the way you think about history and the world around you. In Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity, you'll hear this ever-evolving story-the history of everything-in its monumental entirety from the moment the Universe grew from the size of an atom to the size of a galaxy in a fraction of a second. 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. A Grand Synthesis of Knowledge:  Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourse -cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history-fit together? Big History answers that question by weaving a single story from a variety of scholarly disciplines. Like traditional creation stories told by the world's great religions and mythologies, Big History provides a map of our place in space and time. But it does so using the insights and knowledge of modern science, as synthesized by a renowned historian. This is a story scholars have been able to tell only since the middle of the last century, thanks to the development of new dating techniques in the mid-1900s. As Professor Christian explains, this story will continue to grow and change as scientists and historians accumulate new knowledge about our shared past. To tell this epic, he organizes the history of creation into 8 thresholds which mark a point in history when something truly new appeared began to arise...