Big History

Big History is the examination of our past, it attempts to explain our present, and it forces us to imagine our future. The framework of Big History looks at Cosmic, Geological, and Biological history. The theory of Big History was first developed by David Christian, in the 1980s. David Christian first taught this course at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia in 1989. He developed the curriculum of Big History by collaborating with science, humanities, and social science scholars and professionals. Big History has grown to be a joint effort between teachers, scholars, scientists, and Big History supporters. The concept of Big History is made up of eight major thresholds. They include: big bang, stars light up, new chemical elements, earth and the solar system, life on earth, collective learning, agriculture, and the modern revolution. In other words, Big History is an all encompassing way of looking at our history from the beginning or “big bang” to our social structures and ecology of our earth. 

The subject is quite interesting and a complete eye-opener to me. I had heard the term “big history” thrown around from time to time but I had never taken the time to learn about it as I have. When Bill Gates learned about David Christian he was immediately interested and invested his own money to fund the Big History Project. According to Bill Gates, he wishes he would have taken David Christian’s course in school and that it would have prepared him much more and to be able to read the material to other courses and help in his learning overall. 

Bill Gates is so passionate over the subject that he would like to bring Big History to the high schools and I agree. I would encourage everyone to go to www.bighistoryproject.com and learn a wealth of information and perhaps even become a certified “Big Historian”. 

The following is an easy to follow side by side comparison of Converntional History and Big History. One of the biggest lesson and takeaways to me is that conventionally we see history as something that has happened in the past but my new interpretation, thanks to Big History, is that history is the making and we are creating it as we speak. 

Conventional History	Big History
5000 BCE to present	Big Bang to present
7,000–10,000 years	13.8 billion years
Compartmentalized fields of study	Interdisciplinary approach
Focus on human civilization	Focus on how humankind fits within the universe
Taught mostly with books	Taught on interactive platforms at: Coursera, Youtube's Crash Course, Big History Project, Macquarie University, ChronoZoom
Microhistory	Macrohistory
Focus on trends, processes	Focus on analogy, metaphor
Based on a variety of documents, including written records and material artifacts	Based on current knowledge about phenomena such as fossils, ecological changes, genetic analysis, telescope data, in addition to conventional historical data

Website References: 
https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home
https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n96-115443/
http://pdg.ge.infn.it/2011/reviews/rpp2011-rev-cosmological-parameters.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History