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“Big History” by David Christian Essay

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Big History is a field of study that attempts to examine the comprehensive history of the Earth, cosmos, humanity, and life by use of the best possible evidence-based research and academic approaches. Ideally, it opposes specialization and looks for worldwide trends and styles. Moreover, Big History analyzes long time frames using a multi-disciplinary technique based upon merging multiple disciplines, including humanities and science, and examining human existence. This discipline integrates information about life, the cosmos, society, and the Earth by employing empirical data to explore the relationship between cause and effect, typically taught in higher education (Christian, 2017). David Christian, a lecturer at Macquarie University, formed Big History. According to the author, this discipline explores the past using multiple time frames (Christian, 2017). It is based primarily on 13.8 billion years ago to the present, as opposed to reconstructionist history, which starts with written records of civilization and farming. That connects with the week two lecture notes on slide 32 about the concept of the Big Bang, which saw the creation of space, time, matter, and energy.

Most of the courses in Big History are centered on the universe. They indicate that humanity fits in this concept and places world history in the broader perspective of the universe’s origin. On the contrary, the conventional narrative emphasizes human society with humans at the center stage. Christian (2017) argues that Big History goes rapidly through an extended historical period, including Ancient Egypt and the Renaissance, and again by drawing on the current findings from geoscience, psychology, biology, prehistory, and archaeology, among other studies. In general, the concept of Big History originated from the aspiration to surpass the self-contained and specialized disciplines that evolved in the twenty-first century (Christian, 2017). The field attempts to capture history while examining the common patterns and themes across different time frames.

Big History is considered a product of the information era, marked by writing, speech, and printing. It studies the evolution of the star system, the universe, and the solar system. It covered the origins of life and the millions of years of time when early man was a hunter and gatherer. According to Christian (2017), Big History is a stage of transitioning to civilization from primitive immobile cave dwellers to aggressive cultured farmers. Christian states that this discipline has more of an interdisciplinary foundation (Christian, 2017). It attempts to reiterate world history, considering scientific developments through techniques like genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating, among other methods used in world history and anthropology. Finally, it balances the differences based on multiple time frames and accounts for commonalities and variations between the human, geographic and cosmogonic perspectives.

References

Christian, D. (2017). What is big history? Journal of Big History, 1(1), 4-19. Web.

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