As Christian explained in his 1991 article: We cannot fully understand the past few millennia without understanding the far longer period of time in which all members of our own species lived as gatherers and hunters … Palaeolithic society, in its turn, cannot be fully understood without some idea of the evolution of our own species over several million years … Such arguments may seem to lead us to an endless regress, but it is now clear that they do not. Once we accept that history should extend beyond the era of written sources, it opened the possibility to go much further. Here he challenged one of the foundational premises of modern historical analysis. At a time when, in Jean-François Lyotard’s memorable phrase from 1979, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ represented the era’s postmodern condition, Christian headed in the opposite direction.Ĭhristian not only argued that historians should broaden their narratives beyond their narrow specialisations, he also questioned the necessity of focusing solely on the era of history documented by written records. Christian’s discipline of history, for instance, had grown fragmented into geographic and temporal specialisations, while narrow studies of archival sources were preferred to large-scale narratives that were more common earlier in the century.
This trend played a role in further dividing the ‘two cultures’ of knowledge represented by the arts and sciences, but also led to divisions within those two cultures as well. The course promised to transform the way students were taught history by focusing on the big picture and what united all humans rather than what divided them.Īt the time, Christian was reacting to a trend in academic life towards increasing specialisation. The idea for the course was to situate human history within a grand historical narrative that stretched backwards in time to the origins of the cosmos in the Big Bang and forwards to include the present and future development of the human species. He based it on an interdisciplinary course that he had been teaching at Macquarie University in Sydney that brought together faculty members from the sciences and the humanities. Three decades later, it’s time to take a look at how Big History has fared.ĭavid Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991. Big History also promised to fill the existential void left by the ostensible erosion of religious beliefs. This universal story, in turn, would provide students with a basic framework for their subsequent studies – and for life itself.
The goal was to produce a story of life that could be discerned by synthesising cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. I'm out of superlatives for what Diane has created here and shared with us all, so thank you Diane! If you find this useful, or end up creating your own Currently Inked database please let me know, and let Diane know how fantastic this information is.Big History burst on to the scene 30 years ago, promising to reinvigorate a stale and overspecialised academic discipline by situating the human past within a holistic account at a cosmic scale. The time and effort she put into this is unmatched, and I would hate to butcher it when reformatting for the blog.ĭownload Currently Inked with Aeon Timeline (4.4 MB.
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So much so, that I am posting her article in it's full glory as a downloadable. Little did I know what would arrive in my inbox only days later.ĭiane describes herself as "a renegade physicist, engineer, photographer and writer," and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. I asked if she would be interested in writing a guest post about her setup for The Pen Addict. She showed me how she tracks her pen collection using a product called Aeon Timeline, and the results knocked my socks off. Meeting Diane was a highlight for me, and what she has done here for all of us is nothing short of amazing. from the moment I arrived until the moment I left. There were shining examples of amazing people in Washington D.C. I talk about this all the time, and it is the truth. The people are the best part of any pen show.
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