David Christian (historian)

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David Christian (born December 8, 1946 in Brooklyn ), actually David Gilbert Christian, is an American-Australian historian and founder and most important representative of Big History , which thinks history and natural history as belonging together.

Vita

Christian, son of British and American parents, grew up in Nigeria and England .

Christian completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Oxford and graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a master's degree in 19th century Russian history . For research on this very topic, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1974. assigned. From 1975 to 2000 he taught and researched at Macquarie University in Sydney , initially on Russian and European history.

In the 1980s, Christian began to be more interested in world history and put history in a larger context. In 1989 he began to give lectures on Big History , which focus on history from the Big Bang to the present in an interdisciplinary manner .

In 2001 Christian moved to San Diego State University , California. In 2009 Christian returned to Macquarie University.

Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities , the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and the Royal Society of New South Wales . He was the founding president of the International Big History Association.

Big History

Christian coined the term Big History . According to Christian, big history differs from conventional approaches in several ways. On the one hand, there is the interdisciplinary aspect: research on big history includes cosmology, geology, archeology and evolutionary biology, as well as ordinary human history. On the other hand, according to Christian, changing the viewing scale leads to a fundamental change in perspective: similar to a photographer with a zoom lens, the historian of big history can change the time scale: from the human to the geological to the cosmological. According to Christian, this leads to new insights into known historical questions such as the system / environmental problem, environmental history or the nature of historical development itself.

Christian predicted in 2010 that the historical sciences would in future be less based on documents than on empirical research.

“... Over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of“ universal history ”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods. "

- David Christian : In: History and Theory (2010)

Bill Gates found out about Christian through the popular online course Big History at the Teaching Company . In 2011, Christian and Gates launched the Big History Project educational initiative , which targets students in high schools in the United States and Australia; it is based on a free version of an online study course on Big History funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation . To kick off, Gates presented Christian at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach , California.

Awards and honors

  • 2005: World History Association Book Prize (for Maps of Time )
  • 2014: Distinguished Professor, Macquarie University

Fonts

  • Big History: The history of the world - from the Big Bang to the future of mankind. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2018 [hardback, 384 pages, translation of Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, Little, Brown and Company, 2018]
  • Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. McGraw-Hill Education, 2014 (with Cynthia Stokes Brown and Craig Benjamin)
  • This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Berkshire Publishing, 2007
  • Maps of Time: An Introduction to “Big History”. University of California Press, 2005
  • Realms of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, Silk Road Studies, IV. Brepols, 2000 (with C. Benjamin)
  • Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, Silk Road Studies, II. Brepols, 1998 (with C. Benjamin)
  • A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Volume 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Blackwell, 1998
  • "Living Water": Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation. Clarendon Press, 1990
  • Power and Privilege: Russia and the Soviet Union in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Pitman / Longmans, 1986
  • Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia. Cambridge University Press, 1984 (with REF Smith)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Curriculum Vitae David Christian , San Diego State University, Department of History, 2012
  2. ↑ Gustav Seibt: Big History explains the story from the Big Bang to the Anthropocene . Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 31, 2018
  3. ^ A b c d More on David Christian , Macquarie University. Accessed September 1, 2018
  4. ↑ Executive Committee: 2016 - 2018
  5. ^ Craig Benjamin (Grand Valley State University): Recent Developments in Big History . Newsletter of the History of Science Society, Vol. 41 (3), 2012
  6. ^ Emily Eakin: For Big History, The Past Begins At the Beginning . The New York Times, 2002
  7. ^ Vanessa Thorpe: Big History theories pose latest challenge to traditional curriculum , The Guardian, October 28, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Christian, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Christian, David Gilbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian-American historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn