Bibliography
geology and biology, in order to create a uni¿ ed modern account of the past.
It proposed the light-hearted label “big history” for this project. [Available at
http://www.fss.uu.nl/wet¿ l/96-97/big.htm.]———. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University
of California Press. Until the publication of Cynthia Stokes Brown’s Big
History, this was the only available text on big history. I have road-tested this
in freshman university courses for 15 years, and its arguments underpin the
lectures in this course. Each chapter contains suggestions for further reading.
This is a historian’s account of big history, so human history looms larger
than it does in Eric Chaisson’s Epic of Evolution.———. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington,
MA: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2007. Originally a series of essays for the
Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, this is a short history of humanity,
designed to be read in one or two sittings so the reader can keep sight of the
large patterns.———. “World History in Context.” Journal of World History 14, no. 4
(2003): 437–58. Discusses the place of human history in the larger history
of the Universe. Available at: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/
jwh/14.4/christian.html.Cipolla, Carlo M. The Economic History of World Population. 6th ed.
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974. A very concise survey of the
history of human population, though now slightly dated, particularly on kin-
ordered societies.Coatsworth, John H. “Welfare.” American Historical Review 101,
no. 1 (February 1996): 1–17. Summarizes in very general terms what
we know about the major changes in human health and welfare from
archaeological evidence.Cohen, Mark. Health and the Rise of Civilization. London and New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Argues that in many ways the emergence
of agricultural societies meant a decline in general levels of wealth and
human welfare.