Why Aren't More People Teaching Big History?

It has been almost twenty years since David Christian began saying to his colleagues in the history department at Macquarie University in Sydney that they needed to provide an introductory history course that started at the beginning of time—at the Big Bang itself. After some resistance, his colleagues eventually encouraged Christian to construct and teach such a course, which he did by inviting specialists in astronomy, physics, geology, and biology to cover the material that he could not yet handle.

Now, almost twenty years later, how many courses that start with the Big Bang and go to the present are being taught in the world? David Christian has indefatigably written and spoken about the need for big history courses and the rewards of teaching them, but as far as I know there are still no more than about a dozen such courses at the college level. Fred Spier holds the world's only appointment in big history at the University of Amsterdam. Marnie Hughes-Warrington teaches big history courses at Macquarie University; David Christian teaches them at San Diego State University. Their former student Craig Benjamin teaches big history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while John Mears has pioneered it at Southern Methodist University. Other big history instructors include Walter Alvarez (geology) at the University of California, Berkeley; Eric Chaisson (astronomy) at Tufts University; Loyal Rue (philosophy and religion) at Luther College; Jonathan Markly at California State University, Fullerton; and myself at Dominican University of California.

Many of those teaching big history share my experience of teaching it under the radar. We have often not asked permission, but simply used the names of world history courses on the books and transformed them into big history courses, informing the students of our intentions as we give out the syllabus. This strategy has enabled us to gain experience and to demonstrate the rewards of such courses, particularly the overwhelmingly positive response from students.

Now, however, it seems time to go more public and engage our faculty colleagues across the disciplines in a dialogue about why big history needs to be widely taught and where it might fit into the curriculum, comprising as it does the whole curriculum.

To stimulate this discussion, I want to try to explain why big history has been building slowly. Then I will make a case for why big history needs to be widely taught. This may seem a bit abstract to those who have not yet taken a plunge into the waters of big history; perhaps you could get into the mood by imagining yourself constructing a syllabus for big history.

One reason so few people teach big history is our natural fear of looking ridiculous. Big history covers too many fields for comfort and ignores the great divide between science and the humanities. How could one person possibly know enough about so many fields to face classes of students without fearing embarrassment from their questions?

Another reason for the slow development of big history is that very few faculty or students even recognize the term "big history." They have never imagined or thought about the complete story from beginning to now; the whole idea is likely to seem preposterous. Furthermore, there is not even common agreement about the term "big history." Scientists tend to call it the "evolutionary epic;" some call it the "cosmic epic" or the "universe story." "Big history" may seem a bit flip for so awesome a story, but historians have not yet come up with another term as appealing.

A third reason for the slow start of big history is that it does not fit into the departmental structure of colleges and universities. It seems to fit most easily into history, but only if history is expanded from its traditional sense of recorded history into including all other fields. Our 20th-century understanding that the universe is expanding, even accelerating its expansion, means that the universe has a history, and astronomy has become a historical field. But this is not yet widely recognized by the general public. Geology and biology have been historical fields...