A Crash Course in World History

Give John Green 40 weeks, and Green will give you a play­ful and high­ly visu­al crash course in world his­to­ry, tak­ing you from the begin­ning of human civ­i­liza­tion 15,000 years ago through to our mod­ern age. If you’re not famil­iar with him, Green is a best­selling author of sev­er­al young adult books (Look­ing for Alas­ka, An Abun­dance of Kather­ines, and Paper Towns). He’s also part of the pop­u­lar vlog­broth­ers and an active Twit­ter user with more than 1.1 mil­lion fol­low­ers — that’s about 22 times what we have, to put things in per­spec­tive.

The series starts with The Agri­cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (above) and the Indus Val­ley Civ­i­liza­tion (below). New video install­ments will be released through­out the year here. And more uni­ver­si­ty-lev­el his­to­ry cours­es can be found in our big col­lec­tion of 1,300 Free Cours­es Online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!