think-big dept.

I am currently listening to an audiobook lecture series by David Christian, a history professor at SDSU. Christian, when he was previously teaching at Macquarie University in Australia, pioneered a course called "Big History". Normally, history courses exclusively navigate the familiar terrain of the past that is embedded in human experience, perpetuated in myth, or transmitted through oral and written records. David Christian's vision is a little larger than that. In Big History, he covers the history of the universe -- starting from the Big Bang, and leading up to the rise of human civilization.
Its a fascinating course -- we may have read about cosmology and physics/chemistry or even anthropology and human history in bits and pieces before, but listening to it unfold like a sequential story is a very different experience.
Highly recommended, and available here.