I’ve been hoping to see a discussion pop up on AskHistorians about “Big History” since the curriculum is growing rapidly in schools today. I hope other people will add their thoughts in addition to my own since it is an important discussion that historians should be having publicly. I’m a high school history teacher, so part of me wants to respond to your prompt by saying that learning is always worthwhile, even if it is just for personal improvement/knowledge. Now, if you mean “Is learning big history going to be useful when I go into other high school history courses or a college history class?”...I’m a bit more skeptical on that because big history and traditional world history are completely different beasts in my opinion.

Most traditional world history courses start with the evolution of the human species (but in reality, teachers often spend a day on all that anthropology stuff to start with the classical civilizations). In essence, the bulk of a world history course is from the development of farming to now. Different curriculums spend different amounts of time on the ancient and modern worlds, but that’s pretty much the only difference. They pretty much cover the growing connectivity of humanity through trade, religion, communication, travel networks, etc. Big history starts at the big bang from what I understand and goes all the way to now. Thus, a large swath of a big history course is science focused. Actually, some US states require big history to be taught by or cotaught with a science teacher. Very little is focused on the vicissitudes of humans or their complex and diverse societies. So in this regard, we see how drastically different the two approaches are.

Two “history things” (that’s a fancy historian term of course) concern me about big history. First, I am not convinced that there is enough depth of content on human societies. The whole point of big history is that you see the big picture and see that people are just a teensy weensy little part of that story. Big history deemphasizes the conflicts and developments within human societies in favor of much longer processes that shape human existence. There is merit in that approach, but it also means cutting out most of the complexity that shapes the historian’s craft. Secondly, big history does not emphasize the development of historical thinking skills. Working with sources, identifying biases, analytical writing, note-taking, cultural understanding, and close reading are all valuable, transferable skills that you can use in many of your other classes and outside of school. Will you still be able to practice these skills if you don’t take a traditional history class?

Lacking these elements doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Hopefully your teacher will help you learn lots of interesting content and valuable real world skills. But from a historian’s perspective, the big picture is rarely the best picture. Usually, traditional history of human societies is about context, complication, cause and effect, change, and sourcing. But that’s because the two approaches are fundamentally different.

Lastly (this turned into a longer post than I originally intended to write), the “big processes” of history is not particularly new from a historiographical perspective when you think about it. There have been a number of historical movements that discuss “big history” using various names; these works have many pros and cons that grad students debate in historiography classes. Big history is in some ways another form of a movement that has existed for a long time.

EDIT: Typo