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Cynthia Stokes Brown - Big History, Small World: From the Big Bang to You

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Big history becomes engaging and personal in Big History, Small World by Cynthia Stokes Brown, the first guide in English to a new approach to history that has been specifically designed for high school students. Its also ideal for the general reader who shares Bill Gatess fascination with this new blend of history and science, and fits neatly with the free curriculum available at the Big History Project, cofounded by Professor David Christian and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

Big History, Small World is organized into twelve chapters. In the first chapter, Brown discusses the scientific method. In the last chapter she discusses the different ways people interpret big history and find meaning in it. The other ten chapters are based on eight major turning points, or thresholds, in the cosmic story. One threshold, the emergence of life, gets two chapters, while a discussion of the future fills chapter eleven.

This book is not formatted as a traditional textbook, although it can easily be used as one. Each chapter has questions on the frontier of knowledge, as well as suggestions of how the content applies directly to the reader, to answer the perennial question: Why do I have to learn this? There are illustrations, charts, diagrams, a glossary and timeline, and short biographies of scientists and historians who have been influential in developing big history.

Cynthia Stokes Brown has taught world history in high-school and trained high-school teachers at Dominican University of California, where she piloted big history courses and helped initiate the big history program now required for all freshmen. She is the author of the general-interest book on big history, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New York: New Press, 2nd ed. 2012) and also wrote a university-level textbook with David Christian and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014). She is a founding member of the International Big History Association and associate editor of its new Journal of Big History.

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Big History Small World From the Big Bang to You - image 1
Big History Small World From the Big Bang to You - image 2
BIG HISTORY,
SMALL WORLD
Big History Small World From the Big Bang to You - image 3
FROM THE BIG BANG TO YOU
Cynthia Stokes Brown
Foreword by David Christian
Copyright 2017 by Berkshire Publishing Group LLC All rights reserved - photo 4
Copyright 2017 by Berkshire Publishing Group LLC
All rights reserved. Permission to copy articles for internal or personal noncommercial use is hereby granted on the condition that appropriate fees are paid to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA, telephone +1 978 750 8400, fax +1 978 646 8600, email .
Digital editions
Big History, Small World is available through most major ebook and database services (please check with them for pricing).
For information, contact:
Berkshire Publishing Group LLC
122 Castle Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230-1506 USA
www.berkshirepublishing.com
Tel + 1 413 528 0206
Fax + 1 413 541 0076
Project Coordinator: Rachel Christensen
Copy Editors: Cynthia Crumrine and Olette Trouve-Slate
Design and Composition: Amnet Systems
Indexer: Marjolijn Kaiser
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Cynthia Stokes, author.
Title: Big history, small world : from the Big Bang to you / Cynthia Stokes Brown.
Description: Great Barrington, Massachusetts : Berkshire Publishing Group, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016044513 | ISBN 9781614720317 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: World history. | Human ecology. | CosmologyPopular works.
Classification: LCC D20 .B773 2016 | DDC 909dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044513
In loving memory of my mother, Louise Elizabeth
Bast Stokes (19112002)
Contents
With special thanks to Felix Pharand-Deschenes and Globaa for permission to use their illustrations in this work.
Front cover Earth at Night 2001 Human-made lights highlight particularly - photo 5
Front cover: Earth at Night 2001. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earths surface, including the seaboards of the eastern United States. PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT .
Back cover: Birth of Stars. PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA .
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Charts and Tables
Maps
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W e live in an extraordinarily complex and rapidly changing world. Even more than people in other societies and eras, we need maps to help us navigate our way through the world. Without maps were lost, sometimes literally. Education provides us with the sort of maps that inform us about our own country and the greater world. Education also gives some of the skills that we will need to find employment and a place in our society. We also come across many other kinds of maps of the worldin books, in conversations with friends or family, on the Internet, or in churches. What is missing, however, is any attempt to show the links between all these maps, to show how they all fit together like a gigantic jigsaw map of everything. Its as if we studied the earth using lots of street maps, but never looked at a globe showing the whole world.
Big history assembles lots of different maps into a grand map of our universe. It tells an epic story that reaches across almost 14 billion years and takes us to the very beginnings of time and space. It uses modern scientific scholarship from many different fields to explain how everything around us came to be as it is: how the universe itself appeared in a vast cosmic explosion from nothing, how the first stars formed in the young universe, and how, in their fiery dying days, very large stars forged the elements from which planets and living organisms were formed; how life appeared at least on one planet (but perhaps also on many others), and how life changed and diversified and got more complex over billions of years; and how, eventually, one of the millions of different life forms evolved into a creature that was our first ancestor, the first human, and how that persons descendants spread around the world, and built a great diversity of different societies, cultures, religions and political systems, including, eventually, the astonishingly vibrant global societies we live in today. It tells, above all, how a very simple young universe generated more and more interesting and complex phenomena and organisms, including, eventually, us! Equipped with that map we can ask where it is all going and we can also ask about our own place in this grand story.
This is the story that Cynthia Brown tells superbly, clearly, simply and engagingly, in the book you are about to read. Cynthia Brown is a master of the big history story. As she explains how, step by step, all the different pieces of our world came together over almost 14 billion years, youll start to see what it is you are a part of. This is very much a story about you and your world. And its a wonderful, exotic, and surprising story with many unexpected twists and sudden turns.
The big history story is far from perfect. It has been pieced together by scholars and scientists working across the world over several centuries, though most of the details have fallen into place only in the last few decades. The story still struggles to explain many important phenomena, though it may do better in the near future. What is consciousness? Why did the Big Bang happen? How exactly did the first life forms appear on earth? Even with these imperfections, this is a story you need to take very seriously because it is based on an extraordinary amount of carefully examined information, and it is the first origin story to be constructed by scholars throughout the world, rather than in just one region. As the first global origin story, it is very much a story for todays world, the world of the Anthropocene.
In the final chapter, Cynthia Brown shows that the big history story is not just rich and fascinating; its also saturated with meaning. If you have ever asked whether the universe has a purpose, life has a purpose, or even if your life has a purpose, you need to start with this story. Read it carefully enough and you will find your own meaning in this wonderful, exotic, and ever-surprising universe of which we are all a tiny part. This is the ultimate world map. Enjoy!
David Christian
Director, Big History Institute
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
T his is now the third account of big history that I have written. Unlike the first one, when I was working alone in my downstairs office trying to convert piles of notes into a story, now I am connected to people teaching, writing, and learning big history around the world.
I called my first account Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007; 2nd ed. 2012). I wrote my second account with David Christian and Craig Benjamin; we called it Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014).
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