Big History is an academic discipline that examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities. It explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations. It is taught at universities as well as primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
Historian David Christian has been credited with coining the term "Big History" while teaching one of the first such courses at Macquarie University. An all-encompassing study of humanity's relationship to cosmology and natural history has been pursued by scholars since the Renaissance, and the new field, Big History, continues such work.
Comparison with conventional history
Big History examines the past using numerous time scales, from the Big Bang to modernity, unlike conventional history courses which typically begin with the introduction of farming and civilization, or with the beginning of written records. It explores common themes and patterns. Courses generally do not focus on humans until one-third to halfway through, and, unlike conventional history courses, there is not much focus on kingdoms or civilizations or wars or national borders. If conventional history focuses on human civilization with humankind at the center, Big History focuses on the universe and shows how humankind fits within this framework and places human history in the wider context of the universe's history.Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2008, Vol. 33, No. 2, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. Published by Maney
Unlike conventional history, Big History tends to go rapidly through detailed historical eras such as the Renaissance or Ancient Egypt. It draws on the latest findings from biology, astronomy, geoscience, chemistry, physics, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, prehistory, ancient history, and natural history, as well as standard history. One teacher explained:
We're taking the best evidence from physics and the best evidence from chemistry and biology, and we're weaving it together into a story ... They're not going to learn how to balance [chemical] equations, but they're going to learn how the chemical elements came out of the death of stars, and that's really interesting.
Big History arose from a desire to go beyond the specialized and self-contained fields that emerged in the 20th century. It tries to grasp history as a whole, looking for common themes across multiple time scales in history. Conventional history typically begins with the invention of writing, and is limited to past events relating directly to the human race. Big Historians point out that this limits study to the past 5,000 years and neglects the much longer time when humans existed on Earth. Henry Kannberg sees Big History as being a product of the Information Age, a stage in history itself following speech, writing, and printing. Big History covers the formation of the universe, stars, and galaxies, and includes the beginning of life as well as the period of several hundred thousand years when humans were hunter-gatherers. It sees the transition to civilization as a gradual one, with many causes and effects, rather than an abrupt transformation from uncivilized static cavemen to dynamic civilized farmers. An account in The Boston Globe describes what it polemically asserts to be the conventional "history" view:
Early humans were slump-shouldered, slope-browed, hairy brutes. They hunkered over campfires and ate scorched meat. Sometimes they carried spears. Once in a while they scratched pictures of antelopes on the walls of their caves. That's what I learned during elementary school, anyway. History didn't start with the first humans—they were cavemen! The Stone Age wasn't history; the Stone Age was a preamble to history, a dystopian era of stasis before the happy onset of civilization, and the arrival of nifty developments like chariot wheels, gunpowder, and Google. History started with agriculture, nation-states, and written documents. History began in Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent, somewhere around 4000 BC. It began when we finally overcame our savage legacy, and culture surpassed biology.
Big History, in contrast to conventional history, has more of an interdisciplinary basis. Advocates sometimes view conventional history as "microhistory" or "shallow history", and note that three-quarters of historians specialize in understanding the last 250 years while ignoring the "long march of human existence." However, one historian disputed that the discipline of history has overlooked the big view, and described the "grand narrative" of Big History as a "cliché that gets thrown around a lot." One account suggested that conventional history had the "sense of grinding the nuts into an ever finer powder." It emphasizes long-term trends and processes rather than history-making individuals or events. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty of the University of Chicago suggested that Big History was less politicized than contemporary history because it enables people to "take a step back." It uses more kinds of evidence than the standard historical written records, such as fossils, tools, household items, pictures, structures, ecological changes and genetic variations.
Historian’s Big History Some historians have developed approaches to Big History that keep traditional historical methods at the center. These versions of the field link human history to natural history but still rely on narrative explanation, cultural evolution, and comparative study. In this view, Big History is not only about cosmic or biological change but also about how human societies develop over time.
This approach has roots in Enlightenment universal history and in the work of macrohistorians such as William H. McNeill, who argued that human communities must be understood in relation to one another and within their wider environmental settings.McNeill, William H. The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York: Norton, 2003. David Christian’s early Big History courses also followed this pattern, combining scientific accounts of the universe with conventional historical interpretation.Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Historian-centered Big History often highlights:
cultural evolution and the passing of knowledge across generations;Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity. London: Allen Lane, 2011.
long-term social development and institutional change;
comparisons among societies and regions;
narrative causation and human agency;
scales of analysis that are large but still historically meaningful.
This perspective differs from versions of Big History that rely mainly on complexity science or cosmic evolution. Historian-centered work argues that human societies require interpretive tools from the humanities, including textual analysis and institutional history. Recent scholarship has applied these ideas to specific regions and periods, showing how human development can be studied within the broader context of cosmology, geology, and biology.McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.
Criticism of Big History Critics of Big History, including sociologist Frank Furedi, have deemed the discipline an "anti-humanist turn of history." The Big History narrative has also been challenged for failing to engage with the methodology of the conventional history discipline. According to historian and educator Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, Big History eschews the interpretation of texts in favor of a purely scientific approach, thus becoming "less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics."
Time scales and questions Big History makes comparisons based on different time scales and notes similarities and differences between the human, geological, and cosmological scales. David Christian believes such "radical shifts in perspective" will yield "new insights into familiar historical problems, from the nature/nurture debate to environmental history to the fundamental nature of change itself." It shows how human existence has been changed by both human-made and natural factors: for example, according to natural processes which happened more than four billion years ago, iron emerged from the remains of an exploding star and, as a result, humans could use this hard metal to forge weapons for hunting and war. The discipline addresses such questions as "How did we get here?," "How do we decide what to believe?," "How did Earth form?," and "What is life?" According to Fred Spier it offers a "grand tour of all the major scientific paradigms" and helps students to become scientifically literate quickly. One interesting perspective that arises from Big History is that despite the vast temporal and spatial scales of the history of the Universe, it is actually very small pockets of the cosmos where most of the "history" is happening, due to the nature of complexity.
Cosmic evolution
Cosmic evolution, the scientific study of universal change, is closely related to Big History (as are the allied subjects of the epic of evolution and astrobiology); some researchers regard cosmic evolution as broader than Big History, since the latter mainly examines the specific historical trek from Big Bang → Milky Way → Sun → Earth → humanity. Cosmic evolution, while fully addressing all complex systems (and not merely those that led to humans) has been taught and researched for decades, mostly by astronomers and astrophysicists. This Big-Bang-to-humankind scenario well preceded the subject that some historians began calling Big History in the 1990s. Cosmic evolution is an intellectual framework that offers a grand synthesis of the many varied changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout the history of the universe. While engaging in issues of the origins of humanity, this interdisciplinary subject attempts to unify the sciences within the entirety of natural history—a single, inclusive scientific narrative of the origin and evolution of all material things over ~14 billion years, from the origin of the universe to the present day on Earth.