| Unlike conventional history, Big History tends to go rapidly through detailed historical eras such as the Renaissance or Ancient Egypt.[21] It draws on the latest findings from biology,[3] astronomy,[3] geoscience,[3] chemistry, physics, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics,[3] prehistory, ancient history, and natural history, as well as standard history.[22] 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.[11] 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.[23][24] 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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[26] | | Big History is an academic discipline which 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,[1][2][3][4] and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture.[5] It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations,[6][7] and is taught at universities[8] and primary and secondary schools[9][10] often using web-based interactive presentations.[11][12][13] Historian David Christian has been credited with coining the term "Big History" while teaching one of the first such courses at Macquarie University.[6][8][14] An all-encompassing study of humanity's relationship to cosmology[15] and natural history[16] has been pursued by scholars since the Renaissance, and the new field, Big History, continues such work. Comparison with conventional history[edit] 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 Big History examines the past using numerous time scales, from the Big Bang to modernity,[3] unlike conventional history courses which typically begin with the introduction of farming and civilization,[17] or with the beginning of written records. It explores common themes and patterns.[11] Courses generally do not focus on humans until one-third to halfway through,[6] and, unlike conventional history courses, there is not much focus on kingdoms or civilizations or wars or national borders.[6] 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[18] and places human history in the wider context of the universe's history.[19][20] Take a good look at the latest Apple iPhone — iPhone 14 Pro Max. This could be the last ever iPhone Apple creates… According to credible sources, Apple is trying to kill the iPhone… Insiders are calling this strange maneuver "creative destruction"... And fast-moving investors are set to take advantage of this "destruction" and walk away with a substantial gains… Click here now to see what the secret Apple event revealed. | | Criticism of Big History[edit] Critics of Big History, including sociologist Frank Furedi, have deemed the discipline an "anti-humanist turn of history."[27] 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."[28] Others have pointed out that such criticisms of Big History removing the human element or not following a historical methodology seem to derive from observers who have not sufficiently looked into what Big History actually does, with most courses having one-third or half devoted to humanity, with the concept of increasing complexity giving humanity an important place, and with methods in the natural sciences being innately historical since they also attempt to gather evidence in order to craft a narrative.[29] Currently, the Big History is a consolidated academic field that is giving rise to new views and epistemological approaches, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose decolonial vision of history, economics and Science has opened new questions. In this sense, the transdisciplinary and biomimetics research of Javier Collado [30]represents an ecology of knowledge between scientific knowledge and the ancestral wisdom of native peoples, such as Indigenous peoples in Ecuador. This transdisciplinary vision integrates and unifies diverse epistemes that are in, between, and beyond the scientific disciplines, that is, it includes ancestral wisdom, spirituality, art, emotions, mystical experiences and other dimensions forgotten in the history of science, specially by the positivist approach. In approaching the Big History from the complexity sciences, the transdisciplinary methodology seeks to understand the interconnections of the human race with the different levels of reality that co-exist in nature and in the cosmos,[31] and this includes mystical and spiritual experiences, very present in the rituals of shamanism with ayahuasca and other sacred plants. The common denominator of all indigenous and aboriginal ancestral worldviews is the spiritual and ecological conception that structures their social organizations, which are in harmony and respect with the different forms of life that exist on our planet. [32] In the same way that Fritjof Capra carried out an analysis of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, the teaching of the Big History in universities of Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina is nourished by the worldview of their ancestor to analyze the parallels between the scientific discoveries and the original knowledge of the native and indigenous peoples. Another criticism of Big History made by associate professor Ian Hesketh,[33] is that it mixes up science disciplines using holistic views that is very close to mythic or religious approaches, without mentioning this in its narrative. |
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