Big History

David Christian released “The Case for ‘Big History’” in 1990 as a response to what he considers the collective inability of historians to strike an effective balance between detail and generality in their work. A leading advocate for Big History, Christian contends historians must explore the past through a variety of scales that date back to the creation of the universe. Such an approach allows historians to better understand how different societies perceive time, frame history as a way to understand humankind’s place in the universe at present, and consider the possibility that history is a science with its own patterns and laws. After work on modern world history proliferated in the late 1990s, Christian reemphasized that Big History must

Tracing the background of this movement, personified by Fernand Braudel’s concept of the longue durée (long term), Armitage and Guldi assess the causes and consequences of both Big History’s decline throughout the 1970s and 1980s in favor of “knowing more and more about less and less,” and its recovery in the 21st century. Following 1960s political culture, historical scholarship adopted a more critical discourse that included anthropology, micro-history, identity politics, and post-colonialism while prioritizing professionalism, sophistication, and discrete archives. As a consequence, history now has little impact on other disciplines, fewer people are reading it, and the historian is no longer a public teacher. However, Big History has seen as resurgence in the 21st century with broader fields of expertise on the rise. Armitage and Guldi argue that the historical community has a moral obligation to capitalize on both longue durée’s recent recovery and today’s expanse of digital sources to make Big History the order of the day. If historians are successful in focusing their work on large-scale historical contextualization and the common reader, then they can restore

For one, it is both inaccurate and unfruitful to promote a binary between Big History and micro-history. Surmising that any one category is more accessible to the public than others is a presumptuous, dangerous mentality. Further, big history neglects temporality. If history is, as Christian claims, the study of humankind’s past, then historians must not lose sight that a majority of humans survived day-to-day and neither knew nor cared about these grand themes at play. Above all, these articles all come from an Anglo-American perspective and carry consequential biases. Though unintentional, these articles instill unease that a return to big history may silence the marginalized once more, illustrated by the neglect to digitalize collections pertinent to developing nations, women, minorities, and the poor. Thus, can anybody write a longue durée that speaks for all of humankind? If not, is there merit to a Big History that is not accurate? At what point do historians deem it “accurate