View source for Big History as the Study of All Existence


'''* Article: Rodrigue, Barry H. 2022. “Big History—A Study of All Existence: Part 1: A World Connected.” Journal of Big History 5 (1): 1-47.DOI''' | [https://doi.org/10.22339.jbh.v5i1.5101 doi]

URL = https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582

''"This is a brief overview of the field of big history and my personal reflection on its significance."''


=Excerpts=

==The [[Great Drying]]==

Barry Rodriguez:

"Then another period of aridification began 8000 years ago—the  Great  Drying.  In  North  Africa,  wetlands  evaporated as grazing herds compounded the climate problem.  Prairies  degraded  into  Sahara  dunes.  Some  adapted  to  desert  life,  such  as  the  Bedouin,  but  oth-ers relocated to new areas of water: the Mediterranean, Lake Chad, and the Niger and Nile rivers."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)


==The [[Prehistory of Big History]]==

Barry Rodriguez:

"Far from just a European phenomenon, the new global engagement had grown from the silk-road system into a planetary sphere of interaction that is more properly designated as ‘global civilization.’10Neo-Confucian  scholar  Miura  Baien  (1723–1789)  merged   Japanese   concepts   with   Chinese  and  Euro-pean  ideas  to  develop  a  new  vision  of  the  world  and  existence, as in his masterpiece, 玄語  [D e e p    Wo r d s]. Miura’s  work  has  been  compared  favourably  with  the  later  studies  of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859).  Anthropologist  Keiji  Iwata,  for  example,  sees  Miura’s   work  as  an  expression  of  Eastern  cosmology  /   existence,   with  Humboldt’s  studies  expressing  Western  perspectives.  Humboldt  had  studied  at  the  University  of  Göttingen,  where  his  professors  sought  to  unify  knowledge  and  deploy  it  so  individuals,  society, and nature  could coexist. His five-volume study, were big histories, since they began with cosmology  (as  it  was  then understood) and subsequently linked in the human genealogy.”

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2721/2582)