The best thing about being a publisher is the chance to make connections, between people and ideas. And now that I’ve been doing this for a while, it’s satisfying to see how our editors and contributors develop new lines of enquiry, and have fresh successes in bringing their ideas to the public.

Just the other day I got in touch with Owen Gingerich, after reading a glowing review of his new popular science book, The Book Nobody Read. Professor Gingerich is a historian of science at Harvard and was the science editor for the 1996 Supplement to the Dictionary of American History, one of the first reference projects I worked on. He’s sent me a copy of the new paperback edition and I’m engrossed in this story of scientific discovery, and of his quest to see in person all 600 extant copies of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus.

Science is integral to our approach to world history, and David Christian’s remarkable overview of Science in World History is one of the most important articles in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. This essay is one of the many things we are grateful to him for, and will be of great value to students and teachers, and to historians of science. His Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History is a unique merging of history and science.