Big History and the Future of Humanity, Second Edition
This web site provides a wide range of information about Fred Spier’s book
Big History and the Future of Humanity, Second
Edition, Wiley Blackwell, released in the spring of 2015, in particular for using it as a textbook for teaching big history at college
level. Also e-book versions are available on Wiley.com and elsewhere, including Kindle and Apple iBook versions.
In
doing so, this web site also provides important general information about big history, including links to our major web sites,
that may be helpful to become familiar with big history.
Featuring updates and new discussions about salient topics in
big history, the Second Edition presents an accessible and original overview of the entire sweep of history from the origin of the
universe up to the present day.
While providing this overview, the book offers a
simple original model that explains major
underlying principles of big history, including human history. This model has not been challenged so far, and is increasingly adopted
by other scholars, most notably in the
Big History Project sponsored by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and related productions.
The
widely-acclaimed first edition is already being used for teaching big history at universities in the United States,
Europe, Africa, and Australia. The book has also proven to be very popular in unusual settings, including teaching big history to
adventurous cyclists biking all the way from Istanbul to Beijing along the ancient Silk Road as well as to inmates
in a US high security prison. So the possibilities seem limitless.
The Second Edition has been adapted to be even more suitable
for teaching big history. But because most teaching features will appear on this web site and not in the book, it can also be
read very well separately without any teaching purposes.
For information about the book not provided on this web site, or
to request an examination copy, please visit Wiley.com. To purchase this book, please visit Wiley.com or your favorite retailers.
While
most features of this web site are now online, some information on the Teaching pages is still in preparation and will be made available
as soon as possible.
To the best of my knowledge, this web site will not place
cookies on your device or track it in
any other ways. No advertisements or other third-party Internet-based materials will appear on this web site either.
If
you would like to take a look at our home planet from space almost in real time, from a distance of about 900,000 miles (about
1.5 million km), you might want to visit:
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/