To understand history, we must start at the beginning. But this is a story of three beginnings—the beginning of this course, the beginning of the Universe, and your beginning.

First, let’s start with you. You exist in space and time. You are a thinking, sensing being of the species Homo sapiens who wants to understand the world around you. Part of the reason we study history is to understand the world and our place in it. Looking into the past can help you make sense of what’s going on around you and within you, today. Where does your story begin?

History stories

Maybe your story begins deep in the past, before you were even born. Humans have often sought to understand the connections between themselves and the past. We do this by telling stories. We create some of these stories when we think about stuff that happened to us. On an individual level, this is what we mean by memory. When these memories, these stories about what’s happened, involve the memories of groups of people and are told to and repeated by them, they can be passed down, often by word of mouth, from one generation to another. These are often called traditions or heritage.

But there’s another kind of story about the past. It’s called history. History is a way of creating an account about the past that communicates certain values. Historians, the people who create histories, aspire to be accurate. They try to assemble evidence from the past to give the best possible explanation for what happened. They give each other feedback. When new evidence emerges, they try to adjust their account of the past to account for it. Historians don’t always succeed in reaching these goals, but these goals shape how history is written, drawn, or otherwise created.

The main job of the historian is to interpret the past for people in the present. We want to create histories that are usable. This unit includes a video with a historian, Bob Bain, who explains what it might mean for history to be usable, a concept that can help you in two ways: as a consumer of historical narratives and, maybe, as a builder of some of your own. Recently, historians have recognized that events in the past were experienced differently by different groups and individuals. We therefore need histories from many different perspectives if we want them to be usable for diverse audiences today. In another video, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains why it’s important not to rely on a singular interpretation of the past.

History frames

Another thing that has changed for historians is that we no longer teach history as a list of dates and facts. As interpreters of the past, we instead use themes to understand how things have changed over time. For example, some historians might want to know how societies have changed in the way they view disability. Others might study how human impacts on our environments have changed over time. Still others might be interested in histories of religion, or governance. Applying a theme helps to shape historical narratives—a much better prospect than trying to write (or read) a history of everything, everywhere, all at once!

In this course, we structure our study of the human past with three big themes, which we call frames. One of these frames is communities, which describes how humans organize the groups they live in and how they think about themselves as members of different groups, such as a city, a religion, an ethnicity, or a country—or a fanbase for a musician, sports team, or whatever else! Another frame is networks, which describes how we connect ourselves to other people. Networks range in distance from local to global and range in size from friend groups to international movements. Our final frame is production and distribution. This frame considers how we make, share, buy, sell, and use products and skills, everything from staple foods like rice and corn to giant cargo ships and supercomputers.

Frames are particularly important for the act of historical analysis. But historians also think a lot about how we can communicate the things we learn. Of course, videos and written articles are central to the way historians share what we know. But in this unit, you’ll also learn about a third type of historical communication: the graphic biography, a type of comic that combines art and text. It may surprise you to learn that comics can be just as useful as textbooks for learning about the past.

All these different ways of communicating contribute to our shared knowledge of ourselves and our past. The unique human ability to create, learn, and pass down what we’ve learned through many generations is called collective learning. Historical records and interpretations are just some of the products of collective learning. It’s what happens when people study what came before, improve upon it, and preserve that knowledge for later generations.

Historical scales

All of the themes and design features we have talked about so far, from frames and usable history to collective learning, were carefully designed by the historians who built this course. We think these are the tools that will help us with our big goals for the course. Our main goal can be described by this claim: “Studying the global past can help you understand your world today and prepare for the future.”

But for you to realize this claim, there’s one more thing you need to understand. You’ll need to learn to think across timelines and geographic scales.

First, timelines. In this course, you may be asked to look across vast periods of time to understand how events and experiences and trends connect to one another. In some cases, you’ll even be able to point to ways that earlier decisions or experiences caused later events to happen. There are many different ways you can divide historical time—a task called periodization. We divide this course into nine overlapping time periods. Here’s a timeline for the whole course.

Why do we start a course about human history 13.8 billion years ago? That’s a lot of time and space, and for almost all of it, humans didn’t even exist! But here’s the thing: Humans are still interacting with events that happened long before humans existed. Unit 1 covers a vast period of time in which the basic building blocks of everything—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen—came into existence. Stars were born and died, the Earth formed and changed. Life emerged on our planet, including all the plants, animals, and microbes that we share it with. Learning about these processes, and how they affect us provides you with valuable context for all the human stuff that came later. This kind of study is called Big History. With it, you can connect history at a vast scale (billions of years) to the history of you—even if your history is only 15 to 18 years long so far!

Throughout this course, you’ll be connecting different time scales to one another. For example, you’ll explore how centuries of gradual change can produce a few years of revolutionary transformation. But you’ll also be switching scales in terms of space. You’ll be connecting the history of the whole Universe to the history of the whole world as one human community. And you’ll see how that global history is made up of many national and regional histories, all of which affect each other. And finally, you’ll have the opportunity to connect these scales of the past to more personal histories of yourself and your family—even if your personal history is only 15 to 18 years long so far!

Conclusion

You now have three places to begin your study of the global past. Feel free to ask questions about them but do give them each a try and see how they fit together. They might become useful tools for you as you explore the ways in which the global past has shaped your life, here and now!