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The Small History of the Big History Course at the University of
Amsterdam1
Fred Spier
University of Amsterdam |
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Big History—the term was coined in 1990 by the historian David Christian—is
an effort to place human history within the context of the history of life,
the earth, and the universe. In 1989 at the history department of Macquarie
University, Sydney, Australia, David Christian started a course in which
this grand sweep of history, starting at the beginning of the universe and
ending with life on earth today, was presented by specialists from the various
fields, ranging from astronomers to historians.2 As of 1994, I have been organizing a
similar annual Big History course at the University of Amsterdam. Students
from all departments are welcome to take the course as an elective module.
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In this short essay, I offer an overview of the
short history of our course, in the hope that it may encourage other academics
to organize similar courses elsewhere. Those who are interested in the current
course contents should visit our web site http://www.student.uva.nl/gig/, which
offers information in English (and also in Dutch) on the current course
program as well as on a range of big history related topics, including literature
references and web links. |
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How did we become aware of the Australian initiative?
While visiting Macquarie University in 1992, the Dutch sociologist Johan
Goudsblom became acquainted with David Christian's course. After Goudsblom
returned to Amsterdam, he approached me to jointly organize a similar course.
For Goudsblom, this was a logical extension of a life-long career in which
his interests had been widening. While advancing the sociology of Norbert
Elias, Goudsblom had become increasingly interested in human history, most
notably through the work of William H. McNeill. At the University of Amsterdam,
Goudsblom was stimulating students to take an interest in human history,
while he had also published a number of general studies on this subject.
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I had pursued a very different career. In the 1970s,
I acquired a master's degree in biochemistry specializing in genetic engineering.
Increasingly worried about environmental issues which were then becoming
apparent, I decided to change course. For a few years, I worked at an ecological
farm and travelled overland in the Middle East, Africa and India, in order
to see with my own eyes what the world looked like. Next came my study of
cultural anthropology with a focus on Andean Peru, where I studied in detail
how one comparatively traditional agrarian society worked in practice. In
the early 1980s it was not yet possible in the Netherlands to formulate
an environmental research project, because that field of study did not exist.
As a result, I opted for a study of religion and politics, hoping that the
Andean peasants would express much of their ecological thinking in religion.
After more than ten years of intensive studies on, and in, Peru, including
historical and anthropological research in the Andean village of Zurite
(which became my second home), I was able to place the history of this small
village within the context of both Peruvian and human history. |
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In the meantime, I also kept up as much as possible
with the most recent scientific developments, in which I had been interested
for as long as I can remember. I considered all of this from a big history
perspective without knowing it, since I was not yet familiar with the term.
Yet thanks to my scientific background, I had never thought of history other
than as the integrated history of the world, of life, humanity, and the
universe. In my youth, the Apollo trips to the moon in general, and the
famous Apollo 8 Earthrise photo of December 1968 in particular (which showed
the earth above the stark lunar surface) greatly stimulated this way of
looking at reality. After having seen such photos, it became impossible
for me to think of human beings other than as one single network of biological
and cultural creatures, embedded within their terrestrial and cosmic environment.
So when I became familiar with David Christian's big history approach, I
felt this was the project I had been waiting for. |
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My career had not only been different from Goudsblom,
but our academic positions were also rather unequal. While Goudsblom had
been a full professor for more than twenty years, I had just completed my
Ph.D. on Peru. As a result, we decided to divide the tasks. Goudsblom would
take care of all the high-level institutional contacts, while I would do
all the organizational work. Although our project was certainly unusual,
Goudsblom succeeded in convincing the university administrators to give
us a chance. Finding enthusiastic lecturers proved to be easy. Not only
were they willing to give the lectures, but they also gave valuable suggestions
concerning the program. Getting permission from the university departments
to allow their students access to the course was more difficult, because
of all the institutional interests involved. |
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After more than a year of intensive preparations
we were ready to offer our course to the world. Fortunately, our university
weekly Folia featured our course prominently on their front page
with the headline Super Lectures. Possibly as a result, our lecture
hall, with a capacity of two hundred seats, was packed. At the same time,
the Dutch educational radio service Teleac approached us to broadcast
a twenty-part series based on the course. We were rather reluctant to do
so, since we had no idea of how the course would turn out. Yet their passionate
director Jan Boorsma convinced us this was a good idea. The radio program
ran for two consecutive years, while it was also broadcast on the Dutch
World Service. Apparently, big history generated a big interest. |
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After such a successful start, we wondered how things
would go during the following years. Would we have exhausted the supply
of enthusiastic students? This proved not to be the case. As I have found
out over the years, our best publicity is the student grapevine. Yet some
additional publicity proved necessary, since not all of the students interested
in following the course were reached in such ways. In 1996, our program
received a big boost when William H. McNeill was awarded the prestigious
Erasmus Prize, and even more so, because he donated half of the prize money
to our initiative (see: http://www.erasmusprijs.org/
). After Goudsblom retired in 1997, I became solely responsible for the
course. |
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The Big History course was a tremendous source of
education not only for the students but also for the organizers. Suddenly
we found ourselves in contact with many prominent scholars, ranging from
astronomers to sociologists, who were very sympathetic to the project and
who freely offered us their latest knowledge. Yet in order to be able to
fruitfully discuss the contents of all these different lectures, I needed
to gain good overviews for myself of all the fields involved, which required
years of intensive reading on a wide variety of subjects. |
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Since the course was new and experimental, there
was considerable room for improvement. This was not such a big problem for
the natural science portion of the course up until the origins of humans,
since in all the sciences there are now dominant historical paradigms accepted
by most scholars: astrophysicists share the 'big bang' paradigm; geologists
have plate tectonics; and biologists agree on natural evolution. In each
discipline there are controversies, of course, yet the core issues are usually
not under attack (at least not all the time). As a result, it was fairly
easy to transform this part of the course into a reasonably integrated whole.
In human history, by contrast, no single paradigm exists that would unite
most historians. It has, therefore, been far more difficult to find suitable
speakers for this section, while those who participate are less willing
to reflect upon their place within the grand view. As a result, over the
course of time I have found myself doing an increasing number of lectures
on human history. |
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The Amsterdam Big History course began as a cross-disciplinary
effort, united only by its chronological time scale. Yet even while I was
preparing the first course in 1993 and 1994, I began to discern some larger
patterns in big history that would escape one's attention if one were to
focus only on smaller time scales. While attending the World History Association
Conference in Aspen in October of 1994, I suddenly realized that by structuring
the course, I was actually structuring big history itself. This new insight
led to my book, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until
Today,3 which
has served as the theoretical backbone of the course ever since. By systematically
applying the approach advocated in this book, our course increasingly became
an interdisciplinary enterprise. Unfortunately, most human history teachers
were not very interested in this type of approach, and preferred to steer
away from such discussions. The natural scientists, by contrast, wholeheartedly
supported my angle on big history. |
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Since that time, I have made considerable progress
in gaining a better understanding of the large patterns that appear to govern
big history and, as a consequence, also human history. Especially Eric Chaisson's
book Cosmic Evolution: the Rise of Complexity in Nature, and David
Christian's magnum opus Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History,
have been very influential in further shaping my thinking.4 Right now, based on their
work, I am developing a model of big history that will allow us to at least
partially explain the course of big history. This may sound very ambitious,
yet it is only by looking at the entire trajectory of big history that one
may be able to discern such patterns. For me, making such unexpected discoveries
has been one of the most exciting aspects of this enterprise. |
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The first formulation of my new approach to big
history will be published in 2005 as an article by the English-language
Russian journal Social Evolution and History with the title "How
Big History Works: Energy Flows and the Rise and Demise of Complexity."5
Not only does this new model help to explain history to some extent, it
also allows us to organize a shared big history research program, in which
all the disciplines involved can collaborate as part of one single research
program. This new approach is also stimulating another round of discussions
with the intention of better integrating the course. |
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From the very beginning we have followed a policy
of inviting at least one distinguished guest speaker every year who would
contribute his or her special expertise. Most of them were contacted either
at conferences or through email. Although we have very little to offer in
the way of financial rewards, almost all the speakers I have contacted so
far were willing to come and lecture, presumably because they are enthusiastic
about the enterprise. Our list of distinguished guest speakers includes
the ethnologist Adriaan Kortlandt (Oxford), big historian David Christian
(now at San Diego State University), economic historians Dennis Flynn and
Arturo Gíraldez (University of the Pacific, Stockton, Ca.), world
historian William H. McNeill, physicist James Trefil (George Mason University),
archaeologist Andrew Sherratt (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), paleo-ethnologist
Elizabeth Vrba (Yale University), astrophysicist Eric Chaisson (Tufts and
Harvard University), socio-historian Paul Lapperre (Eindhoven University
of Technology, NL), world system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein (Binghamton
University), historian Piet Emmer (University of Leiden), paleo-anthropologist
Milford Wolpoff (University of Michigan), and psychologist Akop Nazaretyan
(Moscow State University). For 2005 I have invited the ecological historian
Vaclav Smil (University of Manitoba, Canada). In addition to all the excellent
lectures we have been able to offer to our students, this policy of inviting
guest speakers has led to a growing, rather unique, worldwide network of
scholars. |
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From the very beginning we have attracted considerable
numbers of students. Now, we limit ourselves to 350 participants, mostly
because of the limits of our lecture hall. Especially during the past two
years, there has been far more interest than we can accommodate. As a result,
before the first lecture starts we have to post the entrance doors to make
sure that students who have not registered would not take up the seats of
those who have. As of now, we have become the largest and most popular course
at the university. This is not an isolated situation. In 2003, I started
a similar, but much shorter, course at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
There, we are facing a similar situation. In the fall of 2003, I taught
the same short big history course at another educational institution in
the Netherlands, and again we had a full house. Also in the U.S. similar
things have been happening. In the 1970s and 80s, the astrophysicist Eric
Chaisson and the astronomer George Field jointly taught a course in Cosmic
Evolution at Harvard University (Cosmic Evolution is Big History from
an astronomical point of view). Very soon, or so Eric Chaisson told me,
it became the biggest science course on campus. His colleague Tom Gehrels
at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, tells similar
stories about their course: The Universe and Humanity: Origin and Destiny,
while David Christian has been having comparable experiences both in Australia
and in the U.S., where he now teaches at San Diego State University.
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So why are we having problems keeping students out?
I think it is, as David Christian argues in Maps of Time, because
we are addressing the large questions people have been asking for as long
as we know, such as: Where do we all come from? What is our place in space
and time? How has everything we know come about? How can we place all the
bits and pieces of history within a larger framework? We may not be providing
all the answers, but apparently the students like what we are doing. As
I see it, they are voting with their feet: they keep coming. |
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Akop Nazaretyan
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Astronomer Ed van den Heuvel
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Astrophysicist Eric Chaisson
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David Christian
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Folia 1994
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Fred Spier and Johan Goudsblom, 1995
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Historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez
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Historical sociologist Bart Tromp
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Immanuel Wallerstein
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Paleao-anthropologist John de Vos
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Paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff
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Students
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William H. McNeill
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Biographical Note: Fred Spier is Senior Lecturer in Big History at
the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is also the author of
The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until Today (1996).
Notes
1 This essay
has benefited a great deal from Gina Giandomenico's most stimulating
commentary.
2 Actually,
David Christian's Big History course ends with a projection of the
future at all time scales, ranging from the human time scale to that
of the universe as a whole.
3 Fred Spier,
The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang Until Today
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).
4 Eric Chaisson,
Cosmic Evolution: the Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001); David Christian, Maps of
Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley; University of
California Press, 2004).
5 Fred Spier,
"How Big History Works: Energy Flows and the Rise and Demise of Complexity,"
Social History and Evolution, (2005), Moscow, `Uchitel' Publishing
House, (forthcoming).
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