“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. It’s also ideal for the general reader who shares Bill Gates’s 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.”–Provided by publisher.

Big History, Small World: From the Big Bang to You PDF

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