On the Largest Scale: Big History
by Cynthia Stokes Brown
Cynthia Stokes Brown is Professor Emerita at
Dominican University of California. She has
spent twenty years directing and/or teaching in
the single subject credential program. Dr. Brown
is the author of Refusing Racism: White Allies in
the Struggle for Civil Rights (Teachers College
Press) and Big History: From the Big Bang to the
Present (New Press).
We have hardly gotten used to thinking in terms of world
history, and now a new term is going around --
big history.
What is Big History?
Big history is a kind of world history, the kind that starts
at the beginning of time rather than at the beginning of
humanity. Big history puts human history in the framework
of the universe by telling the whole story from the big bang
to the present. Telling the whole story sets the human story
in the context of what we know about our universe and
reveals the connections of human lives to one another and
to the rest of life on our planet.
The term “big history” was first used by David Christian,
a history professor, when he began teaching such a course
in 1989 at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He
brought this course to San Diego State University in 2001
and now has returned to teach at Macquarie University
and at Ewha Women’s College in Seoul, Korea. Early in
his teaching Christian recognized the need to help students
connect local history to broader global trends and compare
the reaction of different societies to global processes, ele-
ments now included in the AP course description. Encour-
aged by Christian’s work, more than two dozen professors
around the world are teaching big history at the university
level, without a textbook yet, although one is forthcoming
from McGraw-Hill.
Big history is not a replacement for other kinds of world
history. In fact, it may be better to think of it less as a new
subject than a different perspective on history. Big history
looks at the story at the largest possible scale, from a “pan-
oramic” perspective, in which the “lens” is zoomed open
as wide as possible, looking at the whole world over all of
time. Other, smaller scale perspectives in terms of time and
space are still necessary; we might call them “landscape”
and “close-up” perspectives, as does the website http://
worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu (see Sources of Informa-
tion). Using these metaphors, we help our students learn
how to move easily in their thinking back and forth from
larger to smaller scales, to zoom their lenses in and out.
In the process, we ask new types of questions that help us
to see familiar aspects of the past in unfamiliar yet highly
illuminating ways.
At the largest scale of inquiry, many features of history
become evident that cannot be seen close-up, much as the
first astronauts – and the rest of us -- gained a new per-
spective by seeing all of Earth floating in space once they
journeyed far enough away. One example: the big historian
exposes the fact that humans were hunter/gatherers for
at least 95% of their existence. How does our ancestors’
long-term experience living in this manner affect our own
challenges living in the modern world? Another example:
people stopped hunting and gathering about the same time
in many places around the globe, settling down to work
harder than ever at farming. Why would they do that? What
we call “civilization” then emerged independently with
similar features in at least six or seven places around the
world, when human populations reached a certain density.
Why would this happen?
Big history is still under construction by scholars from
many fields, since big history by definition includes all the
academic disciplines. Agreement has not yet been reached
about what to call this new field. Scientists tend to call it
the “epic of evolution.” Scholars in the past who tried to
tell the whole story called it “universal history.” Some
Big History / Brown 19
authors call it “the universe story,” while others prefer to
use “macrohistory” as sounding more inclusive and seri-
ous than “big history” – though it is limited to the study
of humanity as a whole and thus does not take the very
long-term view that big history does.
By including human history in the longer history of the
universe, big history creates a new set of issues to consider
in both scholarship and teaching. How do big historians
decide what to include and what to leave out in their ac-
counts and courses? In telling the story, each author must
decide the broad over-arching patterns and then must fill
in with detailed examples of these patterns. Each has a
somewhat different tone and emphasis, of course, but the
core narrative that has emerged, in all accounts so far, is
remarkably consistent.
From a big history perspective, what are the major events,
or turning points, in history? This is a matter of judgment,
of course, but many authors agree on the following struc-
ture to the story.
• Our universe emerges in the Big Bang -- from where, no
one knows, and at temperatures so high that matter cannot
yet form. The simplest elements, hydrogen and helium,
then form as the universe cools.
• As the universe expands and cools, stars and galaxies
form from the simplest elements.
• As stars use up all their fuel and die, the larger ones
explode, creating in these death explosions the more
complex elements, from carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen up
to uranium.
• Two-thirds of the way through the time that our universe
has existed, our solar system emerges, and our planet
forms, with characteristics unique in our solar system.
• Within less than a billion years after Earth’s formation,
the first living organisms (one-celled bacteria) emerge
on it.
• Almost 4.6 billion years after Earth’s formation, humans
(Homo sapiens) evolve after diverging from their closest
relatives, the chimpanzees, about 6 million years ago.
• Humans live as Paleolithic hunters and gathers for more
than 95% of their time (so far) on Earth, until about ten
thousand years ago. The climate warms and humans, now
more densely populated than ever before, domesticate
plants and animals, developing agriculture.
• Farming begins to support cities about 5500 years ago,
and cities develop into agrarian civilizations, that is, “civi-
20 Social Studies Review / Spring - Summer 2010
lizations” supported by surrounding agricultural areas and
ruled by kings (and a few queens).
• Two hundred and fifty years ago humans begin burn-
ing fossil fuels (coal, then oil) to create the industrial
revolution, turning their agrarian civilizations into modern
capitalist states.
• Humans currently face another turning point, given the
unsustainability within the natural environment of their
present means of survival.
When telling the human part of this story, authors usually
emphasize similar aspects of human experience. Networks
of exchange, which reach much further back in human
history (to the Paleolithic Era) than previously supposed,
take a central place. Human similarities are emphasized,
rather than human cultural differences, focusing on human
universals such as symbolic language, private sex and com-
munal eating, rituals, art, song and dance, and distinguish-
ing right from wrong. In the context of evolution, human
relationships to their natural environment become
particularly important (like food!), especially the ways
in which humans harness natural energy to flow through
their systems. For example, since we began burning coal
on a large scale, we are no longer living within the energy
provided daily by the sun; we are using energy from the sun
that has been stored underground for 300 million years.
Why Use Big History?
Big history is another way of viewing world history. It
is worth the effort for many reasons. Here are five to
consider:
* Big history ties all knowledge together, providing a
framework, or common core of knowledge, for all future
learning, in the form of a story, the most basic way we
process information.
* Big history organizes world history by showing what has
the most impact on the trajectory of the whole story.
* Big history emphasizes the common history of humanity
rather than the story of separate groups. By doing so, it has
implications for working together as a global society.
* Big history provides the background for understanding
current issues, which increasingly are global. Some of the
obvious ones are climate change, energy use, globalization
of trade and culture, population control, and preservation
of oceans. Only big history shows people how deeply
they are part of the natural world, providing the awareness
necessary for addressing today’s issues.
* Big history permits individuals to conceive themselves
within the context of the universe, to feel connected to it,
to realize the story of how the elements in our bodies and
the gold in our rings originated in the explosive death of
stars more than 4.5 billion years ago.
By using the framework provided by Big History, history
teachers can make more sense of their curriculum, sim-
plifying it into what is most crucial to the overall story.
Students, too, will be able to see the main outline and have
a structure on which to hang the details. Perhaps most
important, everyone will be able to see just where we are
in the amazing human story.
Sources of Information
Christian, David. This Fleeting World: A Short History of
Humanity. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing
Group, 2008.
This little book (111 pages) is the most useful
source for getting started with big history. It condenses
the whole story into startling clarity and ease of reading.
Morgan, Jennifer. Born With a Bang (2002); From Lava to
Life (2003); Mammals Who Morph (2006). Nevada City,
CA: Dawn Publications. www.dawnpub.com
Go to these three beautiful books if you have
students reading below grade level or if you would enjoy
hearing the Universe tell its story in its own voice. Extra
information in the back of these books makes them useful
from age seven to adult.
Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History: From the Big Bang
to the Present. New York: New Press, 2007.
This is a more extended portrayal of big history
(288 pages), yet readable for skilled high school students
and useful to teachers for background.
Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big
History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2004. Or “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and
the Rise of Humanity,” 48 lectures on DVD, CD, or tape,
from the Teaching Company, 1-800-832-2412.
For depth in big history go to these two, depend-
ing on whether you prefer to read or to watch and listen.
Christian is able to see the big patterns without oversim-
plification.
McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Envi-
ronmental History of the Twentieth Century. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2000.
The twentieth century data mentioned in this
article comes from this cogent, accessible analysis. Highly
recommended for zooming out the lens on recent events.
Genet, Russell. Humanity: The Chimpanzees Who Would
Be Ants. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press,
4995 Santa Margarita Lake Road, Santa Margarita, CA
93453.
For your own pleasure, read this big history ac-
count by an astronomer with a good sense of humor. Ants,
like humans, make up ten percent of the animal mass on
Earth, and live in the most complex known social struc-
tures.
Worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu
This is an invaluable source of ideas and lesson
plans, with a built-in big history perspective.
Gillmor, Frances. Flute of the Smoking Mirror: A Portrait
of Nezahualcoyotl, Poet-King of the Aztecs. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1983; first published Albuquer-
que, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1949.
A short biography based on primary documents
that enable the reader to enter the world of the Aztecs; the
name of the king translates as “Hungry Coyote.”
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas
Before Columbus. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006.
A bestseller written by a journalist, which is ac-
curate and a pleasure to read.
Big History / Brown 21
 Why Big History Now?
The short answer is: dating techniques. Radiocarbon dating, beginning in the early1950s, together with ice core dating
and pollen and tree ring dating, now give us enough precision to put the whole story into its correct sequence. In 2006
NASA announced a precise date for the age of our universe: 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 100 million years. In
1953 we learned the age of Earth, about 4.5 billion years. The date for the beginning of life on Earth is still fuzzy, but
it has been narrowed to earlier than 3.5 billion years ago. Before the 1960s, the earliest firm date anyone could give
for an event in the past was about 3000 years ago.

Other major advances in knowledge have given us a firm framework that earlier universal historians did not have.
For example, astronomers in the late 1920s determined that our Universe is expanding, not static. If it is expanding, it
must have started in one spot, the Big Bang. The idea of the Big Bang remained a hypothesis (a guess without much
evidence) until 1965, when two engineers found evidence of the background cosmic radiation that the Big Bang
hypothesis predicted should be there. This evidence moved the Big Bang from a hypothesis to a theory, now widely
held by most astronomers. In the late 1990s astronomers found additional evidence, that the expansion of the Universe
began accelerating about five billion years ago. Something unknown, which they call “dark energy,” must be causing
this acceleration; they are racing to figure out what it is.

Two other major advances in knowledge that set the stage for Big History are plate tectonics, from the late 1960s, and
genetics, from the discovery of DNA in 1953. The plate tectonics model holds that the visible continents are parts of
rigid plates that move around on the part of Earth’s mantle in which rocks are close to the melting point, helping to
explain much geologic activity occurring on the earth’s surface. Genetic studies have shown chimpanzees to be our
closest relatives, have dated the divergence of the human line from the chimpanzee-like ancestor to between five and
seven million years ago (much more recently than formerly believed), and have demonstrated that Homo sapiens began
in Africa. Since so much is known, how can we withhold it from our students?

How to Use Big History

Big history can be used to set the context for any period of history. It can be used to decide what topics de-
serve more time than others and to make global connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. It can make
the standards easier to cover by revealing the underlying patterns and connections. It can be used to show the
links between history, as conventionally described, and other disciplines from prehistory to biology, geology,
chemistry, physics, and astronomy. A few specific suggestions and examples follow.

Timelines

History as a discipline is characterized by putting real events in the correct sequence chronologically. Using
a big history perspective involves thinking across longer periods of time than usual. At this scale, all of us
need timelines to help us see and remember the sequence of things. The dates are not to be memorized, but
only to show the sequence and the proportion of time.

*On the cosmic scale, students can make a living timeline by representing the main turning points of cosmic
history, as seen from a human point of view, of course! Just ask a volunteer to represent, and remember the
date for, each of the turning points and have them stand around the room, with extra space in the big gaps.
You may decide to add or subtract turning points, but here is a start using nine:

Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago
Formation of Galaxies and Stars 13.4 billion years ago
Death of Stars 13.4 billion years ago
Formation of Our Solar System 4.6 billion years ago
Emergence of Life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago
First multi-cellular organisms 1 billion years ago
Emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago

22 Social Studies Review / Spring - Summer 2010

 Emergence of agriculture and civilization 10-5,500 years ago
Industrial Revolution/fossil fuel 250 years ago

*Ask students to make a timeline of human (Homo sapiens) history, starting at 200,000 years ago, the cur-
rent estimate. Ask them to put on the big dates: the peopling of the continents (out of Africa c. 100,000
BP [before the present], West Asia and Mediterranean c. 100-90,000 BP, Australia c. 60,000 BP, Siberia c.
20,000 BP, the Americas at least by c. 13,000 BP), the height of the last Ice Age (20,000 BP), the beginning
of agriculture (9,000-7,000 BCE), the development of civilization (3500 BCE), the global connection (1492
CE), the Industrial Revolution (1750 CE), and their own birth.

* Make timelines of each civilization, on the same scale, as it is studied, and hang the timelines parallel to
each other to show interconnections.

*Teach students to make their own timelines as they read. If they haven’t done so before, start with their own
life back to their grandparents’ births, listing main family dates on one side of the line and main world dates
on the other. Figure about 25 years per generation. How many generations back to the Industrial Revolution?
To the Columbian Exchange?

What’s Important?

Looking at the six-grade standards in the History-Science Framework for California from a big history
perspective, one sees that standard 6.1, which includes all the Paleolithic and the beginning of agriculture
(more than 95% of human history) needs more time than is allotted in proportion to the other six standards.
In planning for the year, one could schedule eight units instead of seven, or four per semester. One could
allot to standard 6.1 two of the first semester’s four units, or up to half of the semester. This would give time
to provide examples of how Paleolithic people moved from Africa to all parts of the world, adapting them-
selves to widely different environments, surviving Ice Ages, and making the amazing achievements of full
speech, collective learning, precision tools, controlled fire, large-animal hunting, and finally domestication
of plants and animals. Students would have a chance to get over their cartoon images of cave people. One
could even go back before the early ape-woman, Lucy (dated to 3.3 million years), to start the evolution of
humans from the chimpanzee line, beginning about 6 million years ago. That would close the curriculum
gap between science and the humanities.

Before diving into the rest of the year’s standards, each dealing with a separate civilization, one could plan
to take a week to ponder with one’s students just what a civilization is. You want them to realize that people
in cities and states are not by definition (although the dictionary still says so) superior or more advanced
than are hunting and gathering and agricultural people. People in civilizations do, however, live in more
hierarchical structures, with obligations for tribute, and they depend on the farmers around them to produce
surplus food.

One amazing fact from the big history perspective is that at least six or seven civilizations emerged indepen-
dently around the world when human populations became dense enough to require hierarchical structures,
and these different civilizations all had quite similar characteristics. Here is a list of those characteristics;
not every civilization had all of these, but all civilizations had most of them:

• agricultural surplus
• cities
• specialized occupations
• social ranks topped by a tiny elite class
• tribute collected by force if necessary
• state religions and ideologies
• professional armies with frequent warfare
• lavish tombs
• significant modification of nature
• usually, a system of writing

Big History / Brown 23

 An important part of Big History is the discussion about why three of the major independent civilizations---
Mayan, Aztec, and Inca---emerged about two thousand years later in the Americas than those in Afro-Eurasia.
Most historians accept the conclusions of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999) that accidents
of geography were the determining factors. Since there were no domesticable large animals in the Americas
and no wild grains except the wild grass, teosinte that became corn, agriculture developed later and sup-
ported dense populations more slowly. People in Afro-Eurasia could create trade routes and exchange ideas
east-to-west more easily; in the Americas north/south travel proved much more difficult and crops did not
disseminate easily to different latitudes. The Europeans brought germs from their contact with domesticated
animals; they brought guns and steel from their cultural exchange, thus overwhelming the Americans.

The civilizations that American people developed were just as amazing and beautiful as those in Afro-Eurasia,
but they were destroyed by European conquest before reaching their full development. At least four different
systems of writing developed in Meso-America, the most complex being the Mayan, which combines signs
for syllables with signs that stand for whole words. Mayan glyphs have not been completely translated yet,
but much has been learned since the 1990s (numbers, dates, city emblems, and a few nouns and verbs). Much
more needs to be taught to all students about the amazing civilizations of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. See
sources at the end of this article for a few suggestions.

*The sixth-grade standards focus almost entirely on Eurasia, except for Egypt and Kush. One could remind
students that Eurasia was connected by trade routes to North Africa, but not yet to other parts of the world,
that is, sub-Sahara Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, and Australia. Remind them that independent civiliza-
tions arise not only in Eurasia but also, later, in sub-Sahara Africa and the Americas. The reasons why they
arose later is one of the most interesting issues in human history, not addressed directly by the seventh-grade
standards for these topics.

*Looking at the seventh-grade standards, one sees that the pace increases, with eleven standards per year
instead of seven. One could use the discussion of “civilization” above to move through standards 7.4 (Ghana
and Mali) and 7.7, (Meso-America and the Andes). In standard 7.3 (China) one could emphasize the Silk
Roads and the Mongol Empire, hardly touched on by the standard. Yet the story does not make sense without
grasping how Eurasia was interconnected in a network of exchange of goods, ideas, and technology. The
whole world is finally connected after 1492 in the Columbian Exchange, so standard 7.11 is important. To
make more sense of standards 7.8 (Renaissance), 7.9 (Reformation), and 7.10 (scientific revolution), one
could move 7.11 to before 7.8, since developments in Europe depended on resources from the Americas.

*The tenth-grade follows the same pace as the seventh grade, with eleven standards per year, covering from
about 1750 to the present. Big historians suggest that the main turning point in this period is the industrial
revolution and the burning of fossil fuel for energy. Hence, the year’s work might have more coherence if
extra time were given to standard 10.3, analyzing the effects on the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Japan
and the U.S. In addition, the Industrial Revolution needs recurrent attention in connection with other topics,
such as imperialism (standard 10.4) and World War I (standards 10.5 and 10.6).

*In the tenth grade, one could plan to save one week at the end of the second semester to look at the twentieth
century from a big history perspective. That century was absolutely unprecedented in human history. The
human population increased four times, the world economy increased fourteen times, the per capita income
increased four times, and the energy use increased sixteen times. Students need to absorb these facts to be
able to question whether civilization, as we know it, has become unsustainable within the context of our
natural environment. They might discuss what the next threshold in human history might be---some kind
of sustainability, whether devised by humans or enforced by nature.

24 Social Studies Review / Spring - Summer 2010