Big History

Summer AP World History
The Case for Big History “Big History” should be the prevailing way of to how we view history. “Big History” includes more than just human history, but also ranges from the creation of earth (the big bang theory) to how history has an effect on us today. It includes information about our world, universe and all things leading up to this very day. History is a crucial must, if we are to understand our world. If we know things of the past on a larger time scale, we may seek possible outcomes to our future or answers to our recent world history. History is like one big puzzle, and there more pieces you put together, the bigger the picture becomes. David Christian talks about looking at the whole of time in historical
David Christian states that “historians should be prepared to explore the past on many different scales of between 10-20 billion years”. This time frame is a huge part in history, it leads back to the making if the universe as we know it by making history vast enough so we can discipline our minds and enforce facts we know to see the bigger and smaller picture. As David Sweet says “in the end history is all of one piece-that is the whole story of humanity’s changing relationship to nature this includes an acknowledgment that all parts of that story are of importance to the whole and that they have full meaning only when seen somehow in relation to the whole”. I agree, history is a whole so the further you go back, the more you will understand the past and the future. Another example of this is said by David Christian, “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, and without understanding the changes that led to the emergence of the earliest agrarian communities and first urban civilizations”. So adding on to my previous commentary, every part of history is important and knowing some spots helps filling in other spots or gaps and can help you make relationships to then and now. These are great reasons of to why
In general the time frame of big history is way beyond the information for a historian to handle, to know inside and out, to have further knowledge and be able to teach this to students. And knowing all the information in between the start of history to 20 billion years is just impossible. Also, because of the amount of information is so much, it means sacrificing detail and retreating to generalities. Also due to narrow sighted viewpoints on history, much of history is being skipped, forgotten and may be missing larger historical context which is needed for a big history perspective. When using a big history perspective it’s important that you view the larger scales as well as the small to understand the full meaning. David Christian states “many historians deliberately neglect the task of generalization in the belief that the facts will eventually speak for themselves when enough of them have been accumulated, forgetting that it is we alone who can give the “facts” a voice”. Why is it that historians have fallen into such bad habits of neglecting the facts and believing that when enough facts are collected that the facts will speak for themselves? Perhaps it is that historians feel that there is just too much information missing and that without enough they might falsify the facts or miss relationships between time