“Big History” is the currently active effort to bring together in a unified way all of the information about the past, both humanistic and scientific. It is now taught at a number of high schools, colleges and universities. However, one of the problems for anyone teaching Earth history or Big History is how to help students – or anyone – to comprehend the time scales. The panels below help address this challenge by presenting Big History in a sequence of time scales. The panels cover intervals of time that differ by about a factor of ten, but rather than rigid, order-of-magnitude separations, each panel begins at a significant date in history. Each panel is accompanied by a page of text, discussing the historical features shown in the panel.

Users may view the panels and text side by side on a computer monitor to facilitate zooming in on the graphic panel, or may opt to print the entire document in book form or select individual time periods: (For the best user experience, we recommend downloading the documents and viewing directly in Adobe Reader.)