David Christian's Big History

David Christian, former SDSU professor and current Bill Gate’s benefactee has a different view on how we should judge and learn from history. Christian believes that one needs to reach back 13.7 billion years ago to when our universe was first created to fully grasp the complexities of what we call life. 

We have all seen timelines. There can be U.S. history timelines, French history timelines etc… The thing with timelines is that they are dominated by two things, wars and politics. Often times the two are directly related.  The fact is, so much has happened before human consciousness that is not taken into consideration. To put things in perspective, here is the David Christian timeline of humans:

As you can see, in the grand scheme of things, human life is pretty insignificant. Not to say what our species has accomplished in such a short is not noteworthy. Just that so much more has happened outside our perception of history.

The impact that this video has is that it reminds us to look at the whole picture. It is easy to think we, as historians, have looked at a situation through all the possible lenses. Chances are we have not looked at them through the Big History lens.

I agree for the most part with David Christian. However, as I will note how this would be helpful how to engage certain students, I am not of a science mind. I like physical science, but much rather learn about societal complexities rather than atomic complexities.

This can help my students by opening their minds to history as not just about dates and wars. This would be a great intro for students who are into science to get them excited about history