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Big History Books
Showing 1-50 of 1,643
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Paperback)
by (shelved 70 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.32 — 1,328,036 ratings — published 2011
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Paperback)
by (shelved 55 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.04 — 472,674 ratings — published 1997
Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (Hardcover)
by (shelved 32 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.06 — 7,871 ratings — published 2008
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Paperback)
by (shelved 30 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 435,562 ratings — published 2003
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library)
by (shelved 30 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.08 — 1,011 ratings — published 2004
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow (ebook)
by (shelved 27 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.18 — 295,804 ratings — published 2015
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Paperback)
by (shelved 24 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.94 — 75,669 ratings — published 2004
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 17 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.19 — 28,812 ratings — published 2021
Energy and Civilization: A History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 15 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 4,293 ratings — published 2017
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Hardcover)
by (shelved 14 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 182,345 ratings — published 2018
Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 14 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.11 — 6,073 ratings — published 2010
Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (Hardcover)
by (shelved 14 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.86 — 1,012 ratings — published 2007
Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.17 — 4,329 ratings — published 2019
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Hardcover)
by (shelved 13 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.08 — 67,181 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 — 357 ratings — published
Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.34 — 73 ratings — published
Salt: A World History (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.75 — 80,644 ratings — published 2002
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 29,996 ratings — published 2010
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 11,047 ratings — published 2004
Big History: The Big Bang, Life On Earth, And The Rise Of Humanity (Audio CD)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.41 — 565 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 — 10,642 ratings — published 2011
Cosmos (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 11 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.40 — 163,600 ratings — published 1980
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 10 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 82,073 ratings — published 2014
Big History and the Future of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 10 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.63 — 131 ratings — published 1998
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (Hardcover)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.12 — 21,594 ratings — published 2011
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.18 — 6,155 ratings — published 2015
A Brief History of Time (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 493,456 ratings — published 1988
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.09 — 29,072 ratings — published 1991
Humankind: A Hopeful History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.31 — 85,751 ratings — published 2019
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.24 — 3,283 ratings — published 2012
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.12 — 5,188 ratings — published 2017
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Hardcover)
by (shelved 8 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.78 — 11,313 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 — 273,926 ratings — published 1980
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.17 — 983 ratings — published 2005
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.90 — 31,501 ratings — published 2007
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 — 5,033 ratings — published 2014
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.97 — 32,195 ratings — published 2010
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.15 — 54,891 ratings — published 2024
The World: A Family History of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.01 — 1,718 ratings — published 2022
Big History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.24 — 125 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 — 4,678 ratings — published 2020
The New Penguin History of The World (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.08 — 2,592 ratings — published 1976
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 — 493 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 4.22 — 43,712 ratings — published 2018
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.05 — 98,247 ratings — published 2005
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.19 — 33,046 ratings — published 2018
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.21 — 28,398 ratings — published 2011
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.16 — 52,236 ratings — published 2015
The Origin of Species (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as big-history)
avg rating 4.01 — 124,572 ratings — published 1859
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as big-history)
avg rating 3.94 — 4,984 ratings — published 2021
“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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“Ever increasing human knowledge is the ultimate cause of the development of human societies from hunter gathering to agrarian to industrial societies. However as human societies change from one form to another, there are substantial changes in the social and cultural institutions of those societies. The different types of societies tend to develop with different population structures, class systems, belief systems, government and legal systems, and different types of economies. The changes to these social and cultural systems are dependent on the prior changes to technological systems and so occur in a particular order as the technological changes occur in a particular order.”
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