Big History Project

This is truly awesome!

Big History examines our past, explains our present, and imagines our future. It's a story about us. An idea that arose from a desire to go beyond specialized and self-contained fields of study to grasp history as a whole. This growing, multi-disciplinary approach is focused on high school students, yet designed for anyone seeking answers to the big questions about the history of our Universe. 

The Big History Project is a joint effort between teachers, scholars, scientists, and their supporters to bring a multi-disciplinary approach to knowledge to lifelong learners around the world.

I love this approach of learning history in terms of big sweeping trends. For a quick background on the project, and the role of Bill Gates, look up this wikipedia entry:

Bill Gates became interested in big history when he heard a series of 48 lectures by Christian published by The Teaching Company under the name "Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity". For Gates, “he really blew me away. Here’s a guy who’s read across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences and brought it together in a single framework. It made me wish that I could have taken big history when I was young, because it would have given me a way to think about all of the school work and reading that followed. In particular, it really put the sciences in an interesting historical context and explained how they apply to a lot of contemporary concerns”.