This Fleeting World: A Very Small Book of Big History, or the Story of the Universe and History of Humanity is the smallest book of big history, telling the story of the universe and history of humanity in less than one hundred pages. This is an updated version of the popular Teachers Edition, redesigned for the general reader. 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 on a profound and fresh understanding of our place in the universe. Big history leads to strategies for building a more sustainable world and this unique world history is essential reading for our time.
David Christian asks big questions. Will contemporary challenges will lead to the emergence of a new global system capable of ecological, economic, and political stability? Or is the accelerating pace of change a prelude to a sudden, sharp collapse that will drive many parts of the world back to the productivity levels of the early agrarian era?
He presents our origin story and the history of women and men across the entire world, within the framework of the universe explaining, for example, that the chemicals we are made of come from supernovae. He tells the human story as a story of changes: changes in the ways we produce and distribute food, move from place to place, organize ourselves into communities, explore and populate our environment, and both create and respond to crises. He gives us maps of time, history on different temporal-spatial scales, and even offers paths to locate evidence that might challenge his big story.
This Fleeting World originated in a conversation in 2003 at the Connecticut home of world historian William H. McNeill, where McNeill introduced David Christian to publisher Karen Christensen. She was planning an encyclopedia of world history. When Christian contended that an encyclopedia couldn't convey the connections intrinsic to the subject, she challenged him to write an introductory essay that would tie everything together. He agreed. The resulting essays proved so
popular with teachers and students that Christensen asked Christian to expand them into a book, and, with help from educators Bob Bain and Lauren McArthur
Harris, it was published as This Fleeting World in 2007. The title phrase was the original working title of Christian's massive Maps of Time, published by the University of California Press in 2004. Karen Christensen loved the abandoned title and bestowed it on the smaller text written for Berkshire.
