Bibliography
“Big history” is a new discipline, so there are few books that attempt to tell the whole story, though there are many that recount different parts of the story. H. G. Wells’s famous Outline of History, ¿rst published in 1920 in the aftermath of World War I, was an engaging and immensely successful attempt to write a big history. But Wells wrote before the scienti¿c breakthroughs of the middle of the 20th century allowed us to date events before the appearance of written records. He also wrote before the breakthroughs in cosmology, evolutionary biology, and geology that transformed all these scienti¿c disciplines into historical disciplines, disciplines concerned with change over time. Here, I list some recent attempts to tell the story of big history, or signi¿cant parts of it. I have referred most of all to my own book, Maps of Time, because that will supplement the arguments presented, in more concise form, in the lectures. For the second half of this course, there are now many ¿ne textbook surveys of world history, some of which are listed in the Reading section below. Fred Spier has compiled a more complete bibliography of works on big history, which is available at: http://www.iis.uva.nl/i2o/object.cfm/objectid=21E38086-9EAF-4BB2A3327D5C1011F7CC/hoofdstuk=5. Reading: Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. An inÀuential survey of the “world system” of the 13th century and the many links that bound different parts of the Afro-Eurasian world zone into a single system. Alvarez, Walter. T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. A delightful account, written by the geologist at the center of the story, of the science behind the discovery that a meteorite impact probably caused the mass extinctions of 67 million years ago.
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