What is Big History?

##plugins.themes.bihistory.article.main##

Abstract

Big history is a new disciplinary field of scholarship that studies the past at all possible scales.  Its approach is historical, but it links disciplines from cosmology to geology to evolutionary biology and human history.  Beginning with E.H. Carr’s What is History?, this essay describes the evolution of big history, and in particular, its relationship to the history discipline.  It describes what the new discipline is and what it could become.  It argues that big history can help overcome the fragmentation characteristic of modern education and scholarship in all disciplines.  By doing so, it can tease out something like a modern, global origin story, based on the best of modern scientific scholarship.

##plugins.themes.bighistory.article.details##

Section
Articles

References

Allison, Graham, and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1999.

Armitage, David, and Jo Guldi. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Benjamin, Craig. “Beginnings and Endings.” In Palgrave Advances in World Histories, edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity. 1st published 1982. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: New Press, 2012.

Cannadine, David, ed. What is History Now? Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.

Carr, E. H. What is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

Chaisson, Eric. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Christian, David. “Historia, complejidad y revolución cronométrica.” [“History, Complexity and the Chronometric Revolution.”] Revista de Occidente, vol. no.? no. 323 (Abril 2008): 27-57.

_______. “History and Time.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 57, no. 3 (2011): 353-365.

_______. “History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution.” In Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context, edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella, 441-462. NASA, 2009.

_______. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.

_______. “The Noösphere.” https://www.edge.org/ , 2017 Annual Question.

_______. “The Return of Universal History.” History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December, 2010): 5-26.

Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014.

Cloud, Preston. Cosmos, Earth, and Man: A Short History of the Universe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Rev. ed., Jan Van der Dussen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Hoffmann, Peter M. Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Macdougall, Doug. Natures’ Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Macquarie University Big History Institute. Big History. London: DK Books, 2016.

McNeill, John. Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

McNeill, William H. “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (Feb. 1986): 7. Need pp. of whole article or is it just one page?

_______. “History and the Scientific Worldview,” History and Theory 37, no. 1 (1998): 12-13.

Mulvaney, John, and Johan Kamminga. Prehistory of Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999.

Origins. Newsletter of the International Big History Association, VI.08 (2016).

Renfrew, Colin. Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007.

Rodrigue, Barry, Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, eds. , Our Place in the Universe: An Introduction to Big History (From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology). Delhi: Primus Books, 2015.

Schrödinger, Erwin. What is Life? First pub. 1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.

Wells, H.G. Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Williams, Mark and Jan Zalasiewicz, et. al. “The Anthropocene Biosphere.” The Anthropocene Review need vol. and no.(2015): 1-24.

Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. London: Abacus, 1998.

Vernadsky, V. I. The Biosphere. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998.

Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. London: John Murray, 2015.

Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.