Big History



What is Big History? On an evening walk, I joked with my husband that it was just a brief history of time...Get it?! If you don't, it's okay. It was a bit of a nerdy joke. A Brief History of Time is a book written by the late author Stephen Hawking, and also an excellent movie about his life. Today as I learned about Big History, the book popped into my head on several occasions. Stephen Hawking wrote it for the average person with no previous knowledge to understand where the universe started, theories of how it arrived to the state it is in now, and where it is going. It seems to fit right in with Big History.


Big History is a synthesis of everything we have learned about the universe. It includes cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, and the list goes on and on. Big History does not focus on any specific time period like The Middle Ages, or The Renaissance. Instead, Big Historians study how Earth fits into the 13.7 billion year history of the universe. David Christian founded Big History, and says he was heavily influenced by the Annales School. The Annales School was made up of 20th century French historians who thought history should be studied on a larger scale of time and place. Christian divided the history of everything into 8 sections, and the rest of just a very small piece of Big History. I could go on an on, but why not hear from David Christian himself? Click on the link below to see a brief explanation of Big History from Christian.

https://youtu.be/4VICS9cIugo

David Christian's enthusiastic teaching of the subject in Australia attracted people from around the globe, and maybe most notably Bill Gates. Bill Gates thought the teaching of Big History was so important, that he used his private funds to start a program in cahoots with David Christian called Big History Project, which has spread to more than 1500 high schools in America. You can read more about that initiative here. This program is amazing, and I wish it would have been in my high school, but I would have had to time travel for that.


Pictured above are Bill Gates and David Christian as David prepares to give his talk in 2011. You can view that talk here. 

Prior to today, I had heard of Big History but did not really know what it was. After spending only a brief time reading and watching videos about it, I feel so inspired. I love the idea looking at how everything is related. As a student of psychology, I feel like there is so much to be learned beyond just the dawn of civilization. In a book I'm reading now, it speaks about Innate Response Mechanisms in animals as a way that behaviors might be born into people. Something that happened to our farthest upright ancestors could be impacting our mental health today. Now as I start to look around, I think you could find Big History everywhere. It is in the rocky beaches we walk in, and in the metals of the cars we drive.

I won't lie though. At the start of this reading I thought it seemed like a silly way to teach history. I mean great, if you're teaching a history of the universe go then go for it. After some research, I think that every child in America should be learning about history. When I teach, as when I learn I like to go big to small. With that in mind, Big History should be taught from the start.

If you would like to read any of the resources I used today, you can check them out in this list below:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/David-Christian-TED2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time

https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/the-possibilities-and-pitfalls-of-big-history/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/so-bill-gates-has-this-idea-for-a-history-class.html

https://youtu.be/4VICS9cIugo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History









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