David Christian

Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of...

This Fleeting World is the smallest book of big history, telling the story of the universe and history of humanity in less than one hundred pages. Prize-winning historian David Christian covers it all in this compact, accessible, and inspiring guide to the history of everything, from stars and empires to cities, the World Wide Web, capitalism, and globalization. David Christian's approach to human history and big history is a call to action, based...

Lectures by Dr. David Christian, Professor of History at San Diego State University. Surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.

In this episode, we encounter the first threshold of complexity: the creation of the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

Why should we trust the claims of modern science about events in the distant past? This episode lays some ground rules about evidence for proving scientific claims.

As stars collapse and die, they fuse to create new atoms that are the building blocks of all the complex chemicals that make up our Earth.

In the last millennium, the pace of change accelerated sharply and decisively. Since then, humankind has experienced a number of astonishing changes.

Here, study the first four (out of eight) major evolutionary transitions, embracing the first 3 billion years of the Earth’s history, a period in which all living organisms consisted of single cells.

The previous two episodes describe factors that both stimulated and limited growth in the era of agrarian civilizations in Afro-Eurasia. Do these same features appear elsewhere?

In this episode, we examine the factors that contribute to the cycle of boom and crash referred to as the Malthusian cycle.