Jared Diamond meets Stephen Hawking in the first popular book in an innovative new field that seeks to fit human history into the history of the universe, by an American Book Award winner. An epic book that Kirkus called "world history on a grand scale," Big History begins when the universe is no more than the size of an atom and ends with a twenty-first-century planet inhabited by 6.1 billion people. It's a story that takes in prehistoric geology, human evolution, the agrarian age, the Black Death, the voyages of Columbus, the industrial revolution, and global warming. Along the way historian Cynthia Stokes Brown considers topics as varied as cell formation, population growth, global disparities, and illiteracy, creating a stunning synthesis of the historical and scientific knowledge of humanity and the earth we inhabit. Big History represents a new kind of history, one that skillfully interweaves historical knowledge and cutting-edge science. In an age when scientific advances permit us to grasp the history of mankind in the context of its ecological impact on the planet, Brown's lucid, accessible narrative is the first popularization of this innovative new field of study, as thrilling as it is ambitious.