So the dangers you run into are books that try to cover "everything" and compromise too much in terms of accuracy or clarity. They may summarize too much, or not enough and become a slog to read. In addition while you say you're interested in "everything" you may find that as you go you're more interested in specific things than others.

Therefore I submit the Oxford Very Short Introductions series. These are very short and inexpensive, but still written by professionals in the field who include references to more detailed works as appropriate while not compromising accuracy. You can read these short summaries of subjects and decide for yourself where you'd like to seek out more detail. If you don't find one interesting they're short so you can just power through and move along, and if it is interesting you then have a starting base of knowledge on what to look into.

Probably a good starting point might be with the beginning of written history: https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Near-East-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B00IDA40VY

And of course you can't talk about the ancient world without: https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Egypt-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B08TMTCZS4/

(I'll stop the messy links now).

There's one for ancient assyria (overlapping a bit with the ancient near east one so skippable if Assyria didn't interest you).

Ancient Greece of course will cover this ancient timeframe but in the West.

The Hellenistic Age covers the period after Alexander the Great's conquests. From there you could head into The Roman Republic and Empire, and so on. There's one for Late Antiquity.

A couple of these (like the Ancient Near East) are on this subreddit's booklist as well, for another endorsement.

Preliminary disclaimer I’m not a historian, but to be honest, I’m not sure that a historian would be necessarily useful here, besides being familiar with critical reading of texts. Most historians specialize in very specific fields, so there doesn’t exist a scholar who can adequately judge every part of a “big history” book as an expert. This tends to be the problem with these kinds of things: that nobody can be an expert on everything, so the second you publish your fancy unified theory of human history all the specialists come out of the woodwork to absolutely shred your writing. So the books I’ve listed here are either more limited works with glowing reviews, or bigger syntheses I’ll note some of the main critiques of.

As a introduction, I’d recommend you read Why The West Rules for Now, by Ian Morris. It’s not the most accurate book by a long shot; Morris‘ predictions towards the future can be safely ignored and cites questionable or biased scholarship at times (coughCollapsecough), but for the most part, his narrative focus makes the book extraordinarily readable, his quantitative methodology is probably appealing to you as a STEM guy, and the work as a whole is great for decentralizing yourself away from the very modern-centric, Eurocentric narrative usually presented as “history.”

Though honestly, I don’t think he decentralizes things enough. Which is why I’d also recommending 1491 by Charles C Mann for Native American history, A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green for West African history, and Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe for Australian Aboriginal history.

1491 is a great synthesis of modern work in Amerindian studies, and has great reviews from historians, though I’ll note its narrative of “death by disease alone” is academically ridiculed, it’s openly biased towards a certain side in the debate over Pre-Columbian population, and the military historians tend to disagree with the Amerindianists over some of the issues of European vs Native warfare.

A Fistful of Shells is an excellent history of West Africa integrating its culture and heritage into the wider global narrative, as well as fairly readable for laymen audiences. To be honest, it’s the book here who I’m the least familiar with criticism of, but from what I’ve seen from West African scholars, reviews are glowing.

Dark Emu is generally considered as the work in deconstructing notions of Australian Aboriginal primitiveness in public consciousness, and does a great job highlighting lots of the wonderful history and culture that came out of their societies. However, it’s received some amount of criticism for being hyperbolic, but not by much.

And my last in depth recommendation is going to be Strange Parallels (both volumes) by Victor Lieberman. It’s really the only “big history” book attempting to map the forces driving global history that‘s taken seriously as an academic work and not a pop history book, but be warned, this is after the other four books for a reason. It’s extremely dry and technical. Maybe that’s up your alley though, who’s to say.

To conclude, some generic recommendations that I don’t want to overflow this post with are Andrade’s Gunpowder Age, Cline’s 1177, and Cobb’s Race for Paradise. Let me know if you’d like to know more about them, though if I recall correctly, all three are on the AH booklist.

I’m going to give slightly different advice to the other posters and recommend a textbook. I had to buy a couple as a first year history student and by far the best was Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective of the Past by Bentley and Ziegler. It’s a two volume work which covers the sweep of human history and, true to its subtitle, it fairly divides its focus across every region. This is not a textbook that could be fairly accused of being Eurocentric or partisan. It’s littered with case studies which add a lot of texture to the chapter’s central theme, and chapters are wisely divided by focus areas rather than a strict chronology. It’s well written and it incorporates military, political, economic, social and cultural history into its framework, which should give you plenty of jumping off points to follow up with.

There’s multiple versions but updates between them are likely minimal so you could look for a used copy in good condition.

Edit to add that textbooks developed for history students are also less likely to contain factual errors or repeat debunked myths in comparison with popular histories.

Find an area of the world or a people or event youre particularly interested in. It’ll be like a puzzle or filling out a family tree. Everything in history is connected like a spider web. When you delve into something, branches will appear that you can follow to other topics, time periods, events, peoples etc.

Personally I think the Bronze Age Mediterranean is the best place to start. Western civilization was born in this time period and I personally find the Bronze Age through the collapse of the Roman Empire to be the most compelling and interesting epoch in history that shaped so much of what western civilization would become. It’s mind boggling to think about how far back and how much has happened in the last 5 or 10 thousand years and then to realize that it’s only like 5 or 10% of the total time anatomically modern humans have existed and then to realize it’s barely a fraction of the time that has elapsed since just the dinosaurs much less the beginnings of life in earth. There’s just so much that has happened that we don’t know

But I’m rambling. Going back to my original point of picking a particular time and place or people or event to read into, You’ll find yourself asking questions like “I wonder what was going on in China or africa, while such and such was going on in Greece?” And then you’ll be off to the races.

Good luck

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably, OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted a non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.