big history

English

Alternative forms

• Big History

Etymology

Coined by historian David Christian.

Noun

big history (countable and uncountable, plural big histories)

1. (sometimes capitalized) An academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.
   • 2011 September 26, Patricia Cohen, “History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     And for the last 20 years or so, the historians David Christian and Fred Spier have championed big history, urging their colleagues to begin their once-upon-a-time accounts billions of years ago, with the big bang.

   • 2012 October 27, Vanessa Thorpe, “Big History theories pose latest challenge to traditional curriculum”, in The Observer‎^[2]:

     Fans of Big History want to put geology and the climate at the centre of the subject, alongside other branches of science and technology. They believe it is essential to show that the course of human life has been altered by both natural and manmade factors.

   • 2014 September 10, Katherine Edwards, “Why the Big History project funded by Bill Gates is alarming”, in The Guardian‎^[3]:

     Big History’s claims to a dramatic new departure seem, in fact, to amount to a superficial re-labelling of most school subjects as “history” in an attempt to link them.

   • 2014, Richard B. Simon, Mojgan Behmand, Thomas Burke, editors, Teaching Big History, Univ of California Press, →ISBN, page 66:

     We began talking about the Parisian street plan as seen from a Big History perspective, and I began fantasizing about all kinds of possible connections between this street plan and several Big History topics.

   • 2019, Craig Benjamin, Esther Quaedackers, David Baker, editors, The Routledge Companion to Big History, Routledge, →ISBN, page 3:

     Big history did not spring out of some historical vacuum. It is a continuation of the great historiographical tradition of universal history, which in its written form dates back to Classical Greece and Han China, and in its oral form to the earliest human communities.

See also

• deep history
• macrohistory

Further reading

• Big History on Wikipedia.Wikipedia