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21 books
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1 voter
Big History Books
Showing 1-50 of 1,499
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Paperback)
by (shelved 68 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.33 — 1,265,737 ratings — published 2011
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Paperback)
by (shelved 53 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.04 — 458,567 ratings — published 1997
Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (Hardcover)
by (shelved 30 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.06 — 7,645 ratings — published 2008
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Paperback)
by (shelved 30 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.22 — 423,442 ratings — published 2003
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Paperback)
by (shelved 28 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.07 — 997 ratings — published 2004
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow (ebook)
by (shelved 25 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.18 — 288,048 ratings — published 2015
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Paperback)
by (shelved 23 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.94 — 74,742 ratings — published 2004
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 15 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.19 — 26,429 ratings — published 2021
Energy and Civilization: A History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 14 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 4,127 ratings — published 2017
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Hardcover)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 63,241 ratings — published 2012
A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves (Paperback)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.93 — 352 ratings — published
Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.11 — 5,935 ratings — published 2010
Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (Hardcover)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.86 — 999 ratings — published 2007
Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.17 — 4,147 ratings — published 2019
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Hardcover)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 177,890 ratings — published 2018
Salt: A World History (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.75 — 76,895 ratings — published 2002
Big History: The Big Bang, Life On Earth, And The Rise Of Humanity (Audio CD)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.42 — 559 ratings — published
Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (Paperback)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.32 — 74 ratings — published
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Hardcover)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.19 — 10,421 ratings — published 2011
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Paperback)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.16 — 29,632 ratings — published 2010
Cosmos (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.40 — 159,240 ratings — published 1980
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.14 — 10,882 ratings — published 2004
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.18 — 5,977 ratings — published 2015
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 28,665 ratings — published 1991
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 79,500 ratings — published 2014
Big History and the Future of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.63 — 130 ratings — published 1998
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.12 — 21,027 ratings — published 2011
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.13 — 4,873 ratings — published 2017
A Brief History of Time (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 480,257 ratings — published 1988
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.78 — 11,059 ratings — published 2012
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 266,629 ratings — published 1980
Humankind: A Hopeful History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.32 — 80,370 ratings — published 2019
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.24 — 3,181 ratings — published 2012
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.17 — 919 ratings — published 2005
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.34 — 4,935 ratings — published 2014
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.97 — 31,707 ratings — published 2010
Big History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 115 ratings — published
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.13 — 4,312 ratings — published 2020
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.05 — 474 ratings — published
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 40,594 ratings — published 2018
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.20 — 32,407 ratings — published 2018
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 26,967 ratings — published 2011
The Origin of Species (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.01 — 122,215 ratings — published 1859
The World: A Family History of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.01 — 1,549 ratings — published 2022
The Ends of the World (ebook)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.29 — 6,131 ratings — published 2017
Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.04 — 28,888 ratings — published 2008
The New Penguin History of The World (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.08 — 2,544 ratings — published 1976
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.14 — 6,425 ratings — published 1987
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.99 — 3,973 ratings — published 2007
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.05 — 95,401 ratings — published 2005
“Changes in human knowledge causes changes in technology and through the effect that technology has on the social and cultural systems of a society, the change in human knowledge will affect all elements in that society. Changes in human knowledge may also directly affect the social and cultural systems in human society. Ideas such as biological evolution and cultural relativity have affected human society, without producing any technological innovations. Human history in all its elements will be effected by the increase in knowledge that gradually accumulates in human culture.”
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“The key to understanding the course of history is to divide history into two parts. One part follows a predetermined direction and the other part is random and unpredictable. The part that follows a predetermined direction is the part that results from ever increasing human knowledge of the world we live in. The world we live in is structured and understandable and is explained by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology and the known properties of the particles, elements and compounds that make up our world. Our ever increasing knowledge of these laws and properties of matter comes to us in a predetermined and rational order from the easiest discoveries being made first to the more difficult discoveries being made later.”
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