David Christian (historian)
David Gilbert Christian is an American historian best known for creating and promoting Big History. He taught the first Big History course in 1989, presenting history from the Big Bang to today by combining ideas from science and the humanities. He popularized the term “Big History” and serves as president of the International Big History Association. His Teaching Company course “Big History” has 48 lectures and helped Bill Gates fund a program to bring the subject to secondary schools around the world.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946, Christian grew up in Nigeria and England. He went to Atlantic College in Wales, earned a BA from Oxford University, an MA in Russian history from the University of Western Ontario, and a PhD in nineteenth-century Russian history from Oxford in 1974. His early research focused on Russia and the Russian peasantry, and he co-authored Bread and Salt (1984), a book about Russian food and eating habits.
He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000. In the 1980s he began describing human history on very long time scales, from cosmology to biology. He moved to San Diego State University in 2001, where he taught world history, environmental history, and the history of Inner Eurasia. In 2005 his major work Maps of Time appeared, praised as a remarkable synthesis. He also taught at the University of Vermont and Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and returned to Macquarie University in 2009.
In 2010 Christian argued that history would increasingly blend empirical research with a universal, global perspective. He remains a leading figure in Big History and continues to lead the International Big History Association.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:18 (CET).