Here is a history of the world from the Big Bang through to COVID in a little over seven pdf pages:
It was fun to write this. What I know about history is all jumbled up from a lot of sources – primary school through college, tv, my own reading from time to time, etc. It was fun to put it into some kind of order and to start to see the connections.
One thing that was revealing is how short actual civilization is. Agriculture started around 11,700 years ago and the first civilization, Sumer, started 4500 BCE. Before that, we lived in our regular human bodies for 290,000 years. So 97% of the time we’ve been living as nomadic hunter gatherers, and for 3% of the time we’ve been doing agriculture. It’s really interesting and it prompted me to finally read that old Jared Diamond essay where he says that agriculture was a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
My sources are a few middle school textbooks, H.G. Wells’ Short History of the World, J.M. Roberts’ Penguin History of the World, a lot of Wikipedia and then a few other internet sites. There is also a funny twenty minute video of the history of the world by Bill Wurtz on YouTube.
As always, very grateful for all feedback including omissions, errors of fact, errors of emphasis, and anything else.