This interactive session shares how to integrate “big history’s” deep-time insights into an introductory world history course whose temporal and conceptual vision might otherwise remain more delimited. Asked to teach my department's exploratory gateway "Ten Days That Shook the World" course, which had typically been framed around specific calendrical moments in modern world history, I decided to reimagine what might be meant by a day.

David Christian's Origin Stories is a springboard for thinking of "ten days" as ten turning points -- some lasting microseconds, some more reminiscent of an actual calendrical day, and some spanning thousands, millions, or billions of years -- encouraging students to contemplate their, and others' place within the cosmic past, present, and future. We also reflect on how historiographies and other theorizing examining each "day" in question challenges our sense of time, place, and historical truth.

A manifest starting point is the Big Bang’s microseconds (including the open question of preceding quantum fluctuations), together with millions of years’ aftermath, taken in conjunction with twentieth-century scientific debates over the universe's formation. Considering figures like Lemaitre, Einstein, and Hoyle, through Nicholas Spencer’s recent book Magisteria, asks how worldview-shaping stories inform, and shape our own assessment of pivotal historical “days”. Moving across 13.8 billion years without pretense of exhaustive coverage, another emblematic moment comes with March 15, 44 BCE. We consider the assassination of Julius Caesar, by reading Shakespeare’s play from some 1600 years later, to reflect on how changing circumstances over two millennia continually reshape our notion of what occurred on the Ides of March (and for that matter, present perceptions of tyranny). Proceeding toward the future's unknown days, students are invited to think critically about phenomena like presentism, teleological reasoning, and various modes of historical narrative.