Teaching & Researching Big History:

Teaching & Researching Big History:

Exploring a New Scholarly Field

Volgograd: ‘Uchitel’ Publishing House, 2014.
Edited by Leonid Grinin, David Baker, Esther Quaedackers, and Andrey Korotayev
ISBN: 978-5-7057-4027-7
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According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, ‘Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods.’ In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all the forms of existence and all timescales. Unsurprisingly, Big History may be presented in very different aspects and facets. In this volume the Big History is presented and discussed in three different ways. In its first part, Big History is explored in terms of methodology, theories of knowledge, as well as showcasing the personal approach of scholars to Big History. The second section comprises such articles that could clarify Big History's main trends and laws. The third part of this book explores the nature of teaching Big History as well as profiling a number of educational methods.

This volume will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Astrophysics, Geology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Linguistics and other areas of study. More than that, this edition will challenge and excite your vision of your own life and the exciting new discoveries going on around us!

Contents

Contents

Introduction. Big History's Big Potential (Полный текст) 7

Section 1. Understanding and Explaining Big History

David Christian Swimming Upstream: Universal Darwinism and Human History (Полный текст) 19

David Baker Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Collective Learning as a Key Concept in Big History (Полный текст) 41

Lowell Gustafson From Particles to Politics (Полный текст) 65

Esther Quaedackers To See the World in a Building: A Little Big History of Tiananmen (Полный текст) 90

Sun Yue Chinese Traditions and Big History (Полный текст) 112

Ken Gilbert The Universal Breakthroughs of Big History: Developing a Unified Theory (Полный текст) 122

Ekaterina Sazhienko The Future of Global Civilization: Commentary of Big Historians (Полный текст) 147

Section 2. Big History's Phases, Regularities, and Dimensions

Leonid E. Grinin The Star-Galaxy Era of Big History in the Light of Universal Evolutionary Principles (Полный текст) 163

Andrey V. Korotayev, Alexander V. Markov Mathematical Modeling of Biological and Social Phases of Big History (Полный текст) 188

Ken Baskin The Dynamics of Evolution: What Complexity Theory Suggests for Big History’s Approach to Biological and Cultural Evolution (Полный текст) 220

Abel A. Alves The Animals of the Spanish Empire: Humans and Other Animals in Big History (Полный текст) 248

Craig Benjamin Big History, Collective Learning and the Silk Roads (Полный текст) 265

Barry Rodrigue Retrofitting the Future (Полный текст) 276

Joseph Voros Galactic-Scale Macro-engineering: Looking for Signs of Other Intelligent Species, as an Exercise in Hope for Our Own (Полный текст) 283

Section 3. Teaching Big History

Michael Duffy, D’Neil Duffy Big History and Elementary Education (Полный текст) 305

Tracy Sullivan Big History and the Secondary Classroom: A Twenty-First Century Approach to Interdisciplinarity? (Полный текст) 317

Cynthia Stokes Brown Constructing a Survey Big History Course (Полный текст) 328

John Fowler Cosmology, Mythology, and the Timeline of Light (Полный текст). 336

Jonathon Cleland Host Big History Beads: A Flexible Pedagogical Method (Полный текст). 347

Contributors to the volume


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