Big History Essays

Big History Essays & Articles

Walter Alvarez

• Time-scale construction and periodizing in Big History: from the Eocene-Oligocene boundary to all of the past (Walter Alvarez, Philippe Claeys, & Alessandro Montanari) Geological Society of America Special Paper, v. 452, 2009 pp. 1-15
  
  
• The historical record in the Scaglia limestone at Gubbio: magnetic reversals and the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction
  
  
• Big History at Berkeley

Robert Aunger

• Major transitions in ‘big’ history
  
  
• A rigorous periodization of ‘big’ history

Craig Benjamin

• Forum on Big History (guest editor)
  
  
• The Convergence of Logic, Faith and Values in the Modern Creation Myth

Eric J. Chaisson

• Cosmic Evolution, State of the Science
• Cosmic Evolution – More Than Big  History by Another Name
  
  
• A unifying concept for astrobiology
  
  
• Exobiology and Complexity
  
  
• The Great Unifyer
  
• Energy Rate Density as a Complexity Metric and Evolutionary Driver

David Christian

• Introduction to historically speaking forum on Big History
  
  
• “History and Theory: The Next 50 Years: The Return of Universal History”

Tom Gehrels

• The Cosmological Foundation of Our World, seen in a Revised History of our Universe
  
  
• The Multiverse Origin of our Physics does without Strings, Big Bang, Inflation, or Parallel Universes

Hope Harmeling-Benne

• New Paradigms in World History

Elizabeth Kolbert

• The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact

Andrey Korotayev, V. A. Anisimov, A. V. Korotayev

• Relationship Between Genome Size and Organismal Complexity in the Lineage Leading from Prokaryotes to Mammals

Gary Lawless

• Big History and Bioregions

Paula Metallo

• Brain Stretching: Art and Big History

John Mears

• Connections and Continuities: Integrating World History Into Larger Aanalytical Frameworks (This essay was originally published in the May/June 2005 issue of Historically Speaking)

Akop P. Nazaretyan

• Western and Russian traditions of Big History: A philosophical insight
• Fear of the Dead as a Factor in Social Self-Organization

Barry Rodrigue

• A Big History Directory, 2010: An Introduction (Barry Rodrigue and Daniel Stasko)
• A Big History Directory, 2010: Bibliography (Barry Rodrigue and Daniel Stasko)
• Big History, Civilization & Human Survival
• A Big History Directory, 2009: An Introduction (Barry Rodrigue and Daniel Stasko)

Graeme Donald Snooks

• Uncovering the laws of global history
• Big history or big theory? Uncovering the laws of life

Fred Spier

• The Small History of the Big History Course at the University of Amsterdam
• Big History: The Emergence of an Interdisciplinary Science?
• How Big History Works: Energy Flows and the Rise and Demise of Complexity

Joseph Voros

• Macro-Perspectives beyond the World System
• Nesting Social-Analytical Perspectives: An Approach to Macro-Social Analysis