Summary Of This Fleeting World: A Short History Of Humanity By David Christianity
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This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity by David Christian David Christian, author of This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, was born on June 30, 1946 in Brooklyn, NY. Christian’s earlier interests and his first books were about the study of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, more specifically, the peasants of Russia and their diet. One of these book was called Bread and Salt which he co-wrote with REF Smith.
From 1975 to 2000, he taught at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. In the 1980’s, he started a program which taught human history in a huge scale of time. He called this “Big History” and the first course was taught in 1989. It covered Biology, Cosmology, Astronomy, Geology, and Anthropology to cover…show more content… David also announced the “Big History Project” of which he is the president. Big History would teach the subject of Big History to students in the United States and Australia.
David Christian’s goal in creating This Fleeting World was to “give some sense of the vast, complex, sometimes tragic, but often inspiring history of the huge nation called humanity of which we all are members.” (Preface) David believes that people today urgently need to understand the history of humans. He tries to unite us all as people by showing us that we all come from the same beginnings to show us that we need to create a global unity.
I believe that David Christian also wrote this book to make history available to everyone, because when you say the history of the world, it sounds like a really daunting task and that it will take you years and years to understand even a basic overview of our beginnings. It is difficult to find a place to start, and to determine what is most important. With Christian’s book, it’s very easy for most to read; it’s only ninety two pages and can be read in two or three days. I think the goal of this book was to make our world’s history accessible to everyone and more easily…show more content… We walk on two feet, use tools, have large brains, and hunt. (p. 6), but most significantly, we communicate with symbolic language (p. 8). He does acknowledge that other species have these characteristics but cannot communicate with symbolic language. His basic assumption is that these characteristics are responsible for man’s development and ultimately is what he uses to breakdown his study of world history. Christian breaks up his study of world history in three main eras based on what man has accomplished. These eras are Foraging, Agrarian, and Modern. He then breaks it down further into Subordinate Eras by years ranging from 250,000 to 100,000 (p. 103). In simple terms, man foraged, then moved to agricultural methods, and then to the modern day use of technology and that these are responsible for the changes made in