1. Introduction and overview David Christian; Part I. Historiography, Method, and Themes: 2. Writing world history Marnie Hughes-Warrington; 3. The evolution of world histories Dominic Sachsenmaier; 4. Evolution, rupture and periodisation Michael Lang; 5. From divergence to convergence: centrifugal and centripetal forces in history David Northrup; 6. Belief, knowledge and language Luke Clossey; 7. Historiography of technology and innovation Daniel Headrick; 8. Fire and fuel in human history Johan Goudsblom; 9. Family history and world history: from domestication to biopolitics Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner; 10. Gendered world history Merry Wiesner-Hanks; 11. What does anthropology contribute to world history? Jack Goody; 12. Migration in human history Pat Manning; Part II. The Palaeolithic and the Beginnings of Human History: 13. Before the farmers: culture and climate from the emergence of homo sapiens to about ten thousand years ago Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto; 14. Early humans: tools, language and culture Christopher Ehret; 15. Africa from 48,000 to 9600 BCE Christopher Ehret; 16. Migration and innovation in Palaeolithic Europe John Hoffecker; 17. Asian Palaeolithic dispersals Robin Dennell; 18. The Pleistocene colonisation and occupation of Australasia Peter Hiscock; 19. The Pleistocene colonisation and occupation of the Americas Nicole M. Waguespack.
Volume introducing key frames of analysis and themes that shaped world history, and surveying the earliest phases of human history.
David Christian is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. He taught Russian and Soviet History at Macquarie University in Sydney, and conducted research on the diets of the nineteenth-century Russian peasantry and in particular on the role of vodka in Russian society and fiscal systems. In 1989 he began teaching a history course surveying the history of the Universe and placing human history within that larger context. This approach has since come to be known as 'big history', and it led to an increasing interest in world history, particularly in world history at very large scales. David Christian is the author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2011), and co-founder with Bill Gates of the Big History Project (bighistoryproject.com), which has created a free online big history course for high school students. He is currently completing the second volume of a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia, the lands at the heart of the Eurasian landmass, from prehistory to the present day.
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