Era 1 Overview – History of Many Shapes and Sizes
Era 1 Overview: History of Many Shapes and SizesBy Bob BainHistory can be the last 14 billion years of the universe, or the last 60 seconds of your life. In either case, details will be left out, and you’ll need a historian’s skills to discover a meaningful narrative.1110L
Era 1 Overview: History of Many Shapes and SizesBob Bain2Introduction: Everything has a history, and history comes in many shapes and sizesEverything, and we mean everything, has a history. No matter how big or how small, everything has a past and a history that can be written. Of course, you know that people have written histories of individual people, cultures, communities, and nations. And we suspect you might know about histories of art, architecture, music, or animals, or even a history of a particular piece of art, or a building, or a musical composition, or even a special animal, like a racehorse. We have histories of big objects, like the Earth or the moon, and small objects, like paper, glass, or coffee beans.1 People, not just historians, have always created histories of “things” that are important to them. From their family or a family member, to an important object, or a process, these histories are important to people.Everything has a history, and history comes in many shapes and many sizes. In this world history course, you will study all different types of histories. You will learn some personal stories of individual people, maybe even focusing only on a very short time in their lives. You will also investigate the histories of families and communities; of entire regions and societies; of the connections among people over great and small distances; of belief systems and ideas, such as science; of the environment and the planet; and even the history of the cosmos.Each type of history is valuable. No matter how big or small the topic it discusses, every history is important to someone. Each begins with people asking questions about the present and the past. Each uses evidence to answer those questions. And each presents a perspective or way of seeing the past, the present, and even the future. It is important to realize that no history can include everything, even a history as short as your last minute. A minute- long history of you would have to leave out “stuff” like the number of times your heartbeat, the movements of your eyes as you focused on the words on this page, or the thoughts (or daydreams?) that flowed through your mind in the past minute.No matter how big or small the topic or the amount of time or space a history covers, all histories give a picture of the past that could help us think more clearly about the present or the future. Indeed, historians have named the types of histories people have written by the size and scope of their focus. Table 1 shows one way to see this.Conventional NameDescription of its unit of analysis, focus, or scale (the time or space it covers) Micro-history/BiographyHistory of a person or an event in the life a person (a few hours to a lifetime)National HistoryHistory of a nation-state (often a few decades to a few centuries)Regional or Civilizational HistoryGeographic area and the communities within that area or a society (a few centuries to a few millennia)Global or World HistoryHistory of humanity (often beginning after humans have fully evolved physically)Deep HistoryBegins with the evolution of our species with careful attention to our pre-agrarian past (beginning anywhere from a few million years ago to 200,000 years ago)Planetary HistoryThe history of the Earth and the biosphere (beginning about 4.5 billion years ago to today)Big or Cosmic HistoryFocuses on the history of the Universe, the Solar System, Life, and Human Life on Earth (covering about 14 billion years of time)Table 1: Different ways to frame the past1 See Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1997).
Era 1 Overview: History of Many Shapes and SizesBob Bain3Some historians work across many levels of time and space rather than just one. They ask questions about and try to explain possible connections between the everyday lives of people found in micro-history. Or they investigate a biography and larger patterns found in national, global, or even cosmic history. In studying connections among the events or processes at different scales, or levels of time and place, some historians think of these as nested, much like Russian dolls.Personal HistoryFamily HistoryNational HistoryEthnic, Religious, or Regional HistoryWorld HistoryBig HistoryTable 2: Nested or connected levels of historyIn WHP, we will move among all these different levels of our lives. We’ll investigate the strength and weakness of connections among these scales of time and space. We call this scale switching, explicitly moving between events, people, details, questions, and narratives located within these envelopes of time and space to develop useful pictures of our global past.Where to begin? The case for beginning with big historical stories: In launching an investigation into the past or in past or in telling a historical story – or any type of story – everyone must decide where to begin. WHP is no different. And the choice we are making might surprise you. We are going to start world history over 9.5 billion years before the Earth even formed, and about 13.5 billion years before the “stars” of our story – us humans – even make an appearance.We are starting with the Big Bang, the very beginning of time and space, or at least the very beginning according to most of the world’s scientists and historians.Why start here? There are four reasons why we think Big History, the big story about our long pre-human history, is important. In fact, we think Big History is worth a more in-depth study than we will be able to provide here.22 If you have not taken the Big History Project’s course in Big History, we urge you to take a close look at it: https://www.bighistoryproject.com
Era 1 Overview: History of Many Shapes and SizesBob Bain4First, Big History offers our most concise, scientific explanation of how the Universe, the Earth, and life on Earth has come to be the way it is now. In an orderly fashion, it connects human history to the development of other living organisms in our environment and to the environment itself.Second, to create and present a “history of everything,” Big Historians must draw on the best and most current thinking of all the disciplines of human knowledge. Remember, it cannot be a complete history of everything! But by beginning with this history, we are demonstrating how much humans have discovered and learned about the world in which we live and how the sciences, the humanities, and other ways of thinking have made contributions to our understanding. Ironically, we are using our most recent history of human thinking to construct and tell a history of our most distant past. Big History enables us to become familiar with some major findings of human thinking. This way, we can use things like Big Bang cosmology, plate tectonics, and the theory of evolution to make sense of the past.Third, Big History also helps us see some of the differences between the various disciplines or ways of knowing. These disciplines include the physical sciences, the Earth sciences, cosmology, math, history, archaeology, anthropology, and even theology. It shows what each can and has provided us, and also how each has limitations. It shows us many ways we humans have studied ourselves and our world. Big History encourages us to pay attention to how we make and test claims, using intuition, logic, authority, and empirical evidence. We think that starting a course in history using the ideas of so many different disciplines, such as Earth science, physics, biology, and geology, also demonstrates the value of learning history and of learning to “do” history.Finally, Big History places human history in its physical, biological, and environmental context. It offers answers to some deep human questions: How did our universe emerge or materialize? How did all the “stuff” we use come into being? How did the Earth and the environment form and why does it “behave” as it does with its patterns of seasons, wind or ocean currents, earthquakes and volcanoes, and its various climatic patterns? And what about the other living organisms with whom we share the Earth and the environment? How did various life forms come into existence, change, survive, or disappear? In short, Big History offers us a way to understand the stage on which the human story takes place. We will use some of the answers, such as the way the environment works, how the geography of the Earth and other organisms have helped or hindered humans, and how our place in the cosmos affected our history. And, we will also investigate how humans have affected the environment, the climate, and other organisms on the Earth.So, let’s begin with a Big History of the last nearly 14 billion years of time and space. The next article you read will outline the themes of two big histories, one constructed by a historian, David Christian, and an educator, Cynthia Stokes Brown. The other is constructed by a geologist, Walter Alvarez.
Era 1 Overview: History of Many Shapes and SizesBob Bain5Bob BainBob Bain is Associate Professor in the School of Education, and the Departments of History and of Museum Studies at the University of Michigan. He also is the director of U-M’s World History and Literature Initiative and the faculty lead on the Big History Project. Before coming to the U-M in 1998, he taught high school history and social studies for 26 years. Bain’s research centers on teaching and learning history and the social sciences in classrooms, on-line, in museums and homes.Image creditsCover: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Pillars of Creation. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pillars_of_creation_2014_HST_WFC3-UVIS_full-res_denoised.jpgArticles leveled by Newsela have been adjusted along several dimensions of text complexity including sentence structure, vocabulary and organization. The number followed by L indicates the Lexile measure of the article. For more information on Lexile measures and how they correspond to grade levels: www.lexile.com/educators/understanding-lexile-measures/To learn more about Newsela, visit www.newsela.com/about.The Lexile® Framework for ReadingThe Lexile® Framework for Reading evaluates reading ability and text complexity on the same developmental scale. Unlike other measurement systems, the Lexile Framework determines reading ability based on actual assessments, rather than generalized age or grade levels. Recognized as the standard for matching readers with texts, tens of millions of students worldwide receive a Lexile measure that helps them find targeted readings from the more than 100 million articles, books and websites that have been measured. Lexile measures connect learners of all ages with resources at the right level of challenge and monitors their progress toward state and national proficiency standards. More information about the Lexile® Framework can be found at www.Lexile.com.