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—the beginning of this course, the beginning of the Universe, and your beginning.
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 try to understand the connections between themselves and the past 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 are told to and repeated by groups of people, they can be passed down, often by word of mouth, from one generation to another. These are often called traditions or heritage.
History is another kind of story about the past. History is a way of creating an account about the past that communicates certain values. Historians, the people who create histories, try to put together evidence from the past to give the best possible explanation for what happened. They give each other feedback and adjust their account of the past to account for new information.
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. This unit includes a video with a historian, Bob Bain. He explains what it might mean for history to be usable. Recently, historians have recognized that events in the past were experienced differently by different groups and individuals. We need histories from many different points of view if we want them to be usable for all types of people. In another video, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains why it’s important not to rely on a single understanding of the past.
History frames
Historians no longer teach history as a list of dates and facts. 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 effects 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 stories.
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. Another frame is networks, which describes how we connect ourselves to other people. Our final frame is production and distribution. This frame considers 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. 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.
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.
The human ability to create, learn, and pass down what we’ve learned through many generations is called collective learning.
The Big History story
All of these themes and design features were carefully designed by the historians who built this course. These tools 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.
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 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 interacting with events that happened long before humans existed. Unit 1 covers a vast period of time in which the building blocks of everything—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen—came into existence. The Earth formed and changed. Life emerged on our planet, including plants, animals, and microbes. Learning about these processes and how they affect us helps you understand 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 slow evolution can produce a few years of revolutionary change. But you’ll also be switching scales in terms of space, from the vast Universe to planet Earth. And you’ll see how global history is made up of many national and regional histories. You’ll also have the opportunity to connect these scales of the past to more personal histories of yourself and your family.
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 global past. Feel free to ask questions about them, but give them each a try. They might become useful tools for you as you explore the ways in which the global 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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