From World History Connected, a special issue on Big History, including Fred Spier (Amsterdam): Big History: The Emergence of an Interdisciplinary Science?; Walter Alvarez (UC-Berkeley): A Geologial Perspective on Big History; Cynthia Stokes Brown (Dominican): What Is a Civilization, Anyway?; a short history of Big History: a review essay; and an interview with John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. Donald Worster (Kentucky): Historians and Nature. Changing History: An article on four new ways to write the story of the world. Livia Szelpal (CEU): Transnational History: An American Perspective. A review of Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent by Richard J. Evans. Writing off the UK's last palaeographer: John Crace on why the study of ancient writings matters — and why history will be lost without it. A review of Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture by Jerome de Groot. The Classics Rock: Eleven reasons Plutarch and Herodotus still matter. From CRB, a review of books on Herodotus. A review of The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man who Invented History by Justin Marozzi. Jacob Soll reviews Thucydides: The Reinvention of History by Donald Kagan (and more). A review of History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis (and more). A review of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History by Nancy S. Struever. Working in the history lab: From slavery to Napoleon, many phenomena can't be studied in the lab, but we can still do experiments, say Jared Diamond and James Robinson. Big Tobacco and the historians: Jon Wiener on a tale of seduction and intimidation (and a response).
