Unit 1 Introduction: History of Many Shapes and Sizes
To understand history, we must start at the beginning. But this is a story of three beginnings. It is the beginning of this course, the beginning of the Universe, and your beginning.
Part of why we study history is to understand the world and our place in it. Where does your story begin?
History stories
Maybe your story begins deep in the past. Humans try to understand the world by telling stories. We use things that happened to us to create some of these stories. This is what we mean by memory. These memories can be told and passed down over time. These stories are sometimes shared with many people over time. These important stories are often called traditions or heritage.
History is another kind of story about the past. Historians are the people who create histories. They put together what they know about the past to tell a story about what happened.
Have you ever heard of the tenth-century Persian historian Muhammad Bal’ami? He studied documents and listened to scholars to develop a narrative about the past. Like many other historians of his era, he not only wrote about his findings, he also drew pictures of them. This is his depiction of the first Abbasid caliph, Al-saffah. Public domain.
Historians want to create histories that are usable. Events in the past were felt differently by different people. We need histories from many different kinds of people. This will create usable histories.
History frames
Historians use themes called frames to understand history. Some historians study history through the frame of religion or governance. Others might study our changing relationship to our environments.
In this course, we organize our study of the human past with three big frames. One of these frames is communities. This frame is about how humans organize the groups they live in. Another frame is networks. The network frame is about how people connect to each other. Our final frame is production and distribution. This frame is about how we make, share, buy, sell, and use products and skills.
The three frames used in this course to help construct meaningful narratives about the past. There are other themes you can use as well! By OER Project, CC BY 4.0.
Historians also think a lot about how we can communicate the things we learn. Writing and videos are important ways for historians to communicate. But there are other tools, too. We’ll look at some of them in this unit.
That’s me in my comic form! We created a tool to help you observe, understand, and connect the text and art in graphic biographies to the content you’re learning: Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios—Introduction. By OER Project, CC BY 4.0.
As humans, we are driven to create, learn, and pass down what we’ve learned. This is called collective learning.
The Big History story
This course has some big goals. Our main goal is to use the past to understand the world today.
But for you to be able to do this, there’s one more thing to understand. You’ll need to learn to think across timelines. You’ll need to learn to think across geographic scales.
In this course, you may be asked to look across long periods of time. You’ll learn to understand how events and trends connect to one another. There are many different ways you can divide history. This is called periodization. We divide this course into nine time periods. Here’s a timeline for the whole course.
World History Project Origins timeline. By OER Project, CC BY 4.0.
Why do we start a course about human history 13.8 billion years ago? Here’s the thing: Humans are still responding to events that happened long before we existed. Unit 1 covers a long period of time in which the building blocks of everything came to exist. The Earth formed and changed. Life began on our planet. Learning about these things and how they affect us helps you understand all the stuff that came later. This kind of study is called Big History.
In this course, you’ll be learning across different time scales. You’ll also be switching scales in how you think about space. You’ll see how world history is made up of smaller regional histories. You’ll also be able to connect what you learn to yourself.
As we study history, we are constantly shifting scales, from personal histories to much larger scales, like the world or Universe. This image represents these nested and connected levels of historical scale. By OER Project, CC BY 4.0.
Conclusion
You now have three places to begin your study of the world’s history. Give them each a try. They might become useful tools for you. Get ready to learn about how our planet’s past has shaped your life, here and now!
Trevor Getz
Trevor Getz is Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He has written eleven books on African and world history, including Abina and the Important Men. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.
Image credits
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0 except for the following:
Cover image: Handprints on rock at Cueva De Las Manos. TiNeT / Getty Images.
Have you ever heard of the tenth-century Persian historian Muhammad Bal’ami? He studied documents and listened to scholars to develop a narrative about the past. Like many other historians of his era, he not only wrote about his findings, he also drew pictures of them. This is his depiction of the first Abbasid caliph, Al-saffah. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balami_-_Tarikhnama_-_Abu%27l-%27Abbas_al-Saffah_is_proclaimed_the_first_%27Abbasid_Caliph_(cropped).jpg
The three frames used in this course to help construct meaningful narratives about the past. There are other themes you can use as well! By OER Project.
That’s me in my comic form! We created a tool to help you observe, understand, and connect the text and art in graphic biographies to the content you’re learning: Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios—Introduction. By OER Project.
World History Project Origins timeline. By OER Project.
As we study history, we are constantly shifting scales, from personal histories to much larger scales, like the world or Universe. This image represents these nested and connected levels of historical scale. By OER Project.
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