Oregon
History
Online
Index
Early
Words and
Sermons (1): An Online Ministry of Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel
Early
Words and
Sermons (2)
M. Constance
Guardino
III With Rev.
Marilyn A. Riedel
M & M Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin 2000
Hello fellow Internet surfer and welcome to a gem of a site
dedicated
to
illuminating the onyx-like parallels unearthed from an
otherwise
beclouded
and boring American and world historical perspective into
its many hues
and flavors, a spectrum inclusive of most light that makes
up the
untold
stories, fascinating stories and journeys not quite attached
or put
together
in this theatrical or holistic manner as you will find!
I
bring many years of personal and unique historical research,
reading,
collaboration, living, and writing experiences. I am a
published
historian,
journalist, and genealogist, whose roots are in the Central
Oregon
Coast,
the primary though not exclusive gathering or focal point of
these
stories.
I
am not professionally enamored by historicism in the
classical sense,
or any particular intellectual chains, other than the
challenge to
loosen
the usual grip of white Western European, heterosexist and
masculinist
elitism! And yes, I believe in being politically correct,
and am proud
of it, that I still name the names! I am a student and
practitioner of
folk and established history, and am expanding my
understanding of
story,
wishing to share some of those exciting findings and
perspectives. I
plan
to update this site regularly with the little known gems and
connections
to "the rest of the story" usually relegated to footnotes I
have
uncovered
from the current draft of our mammoth, interconnected, well
documented
history saga, Sovereigns of Themselves: A Liberating
History of
Oregon
and Its Coast. I would welcome and appreciate hearing
from you,
comments,
questions, suggestions, corrections, or other resources and
I hope that
you'll stick around long enough to get to know just a little
bit more
about
what this cyber-historian has to offer.
Historians
M. Constance Guardino III
The
Case
for
"Big History"
SAN
FRANCISCO,
Jan.uary 6, 2002: Female tavern owners in early
20th-century
Bolivia. A Polish periodical for Jewish children. A medieval
Catalan
women's
monastery. These were the typical fare at the American
Historical
Association's
annual convention January 4 to 6. That's no surprise. Over
the last few
decades, historical research has become more and more
specialized. As
Gale
Stokes, a Rice University historian who was at the
convention, put it,
"There's a sense of grinding the nuts into an ever finer
powder."
Also
in attendance, however, was David Christian, a 55-year-old
history
professor
at San Diego State University, who has been bucking the
trend and
urging
his colleagues to do the same by thinking big--very big.
Mr.
Christian announced his campaign 10 years ago with an essay
called "The
Case for 'Big History'" in The Journal of World
History.
"Unfortunately,"
he wrote, "historians have become so absorbed in detailed
research that
they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale
maps of
the
past."
To
understand the last few thousand years of human history, he
insisted,
scholars
need to understand the rest of the past as well, up to and
including
the
Big Bang--in short, the whole 14-billion-year span of time
itself.
Over
the last decade, as science has made inroads in the
humanities, Mr.
Christian's
big history approach has gained a handful of adherents. Half
a dozen
college
courses on big history have cropped up around the world. But
most
historians
had not paid much attention until he pitched the idea at the
convention
on a panel that also featured Carlo Ginzburg and Jacques
Revel, two
leading
scholars of what is big history's methodological antithesis:
microhistory.
"What
we normally define as history doesn't interest me," Mr.
Christian told
an audience of a couple hundred scholars. "It's a
constraint."
As
Mr. Christian described it, big history differs from more
conventional
approaches in several crucial respects. One is that its
practitioners
draw
on a variety of fields - cosmology, geology, archaeology and
evolutionary
biology as well as history.
More
important, big history involves what Mr. Christian,
referring to the
title
of a recent book by Mr. Revel, called "the play of scales."
Like a
photographer
armed with a galaxy-size zoom lens, a big historian moves
back and
forth
across several large time scales--the human, the geological
and the
cosmological.
Through these radical shifts in perspective, Mr. Christian
predicted,
big
history will yield "new insights into familiar historical
problems,
from
the nature/nurture debate to environmental history to the
fundamental
nature
of change itself."
Although
most historians haven't reached back to the Big Bang, others
have
certainly
tried elements of Mr. Christian's approach. The French
historian
Fernand
Braudel, for example, combined detailed analyses of daily
life with
sweeping
investigations of large-scale historical forces like geology
and
climate.
More recently, world historians and other scholars have
tackled large
puzzles
- like why world power came to be centered in the West - by
examining
evidence
from several fields, including biology, genetics and the
environment.
The
physiologist Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns,
Germs
and
Steel" is one example. Few scholars, however, have
ventured into
the
murky terrain of the prehuman past.
One
of the best illustrations of big history, Mr. Christian
said, is "Ecological
Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900"
(Cambridge
University Press, 1986) by Alfred W. Crosby, an emeritus
professor of
American
studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Why,
Mr. Crosby wondered, have people of European descent been so
successful
at scattering themselves around the world? Unsatisfied with
traditional
explanations crediting the military superiority of European
conquerors,
he turned to geological history instead.
Working
back 180 million years to the time when the supercontinent
Pangea was
beginning
to break into smaller land masses, Mr. Crosby concluded that
the
conditions
for European victory were being established even then: the
plants,
animals
and microbes that evolved in Europe gave its human
inhabitants a
decisive
advantage when they spread to the New World, South America,
Australia
and
New Zealand.
"Europeans
came from the biggest chunk of Pangea," Mr. Crosby said in a
telephone
interview. "And it was the development of life forms there
that enabled
them to develop a civilization there with many more big
domesticated
animals
and prominent diseases. The peoples they conquered just
didn't have the
biological means to cope."
Then
there is Mr. Christian's own work, which contains
tantalizing hints of
what big history might eventually look like. In "The
Case for 'Big
History,'"
for example, he looks at estimated rates of population
increase
to
challenge the notion that growth is a characteristic feature
of human
societies.
For 250,000 years, he argues, the growth rate was virtually
negligible.
Only during the last 10,000 years did the human population
really take
off, exploding from 10 million then to nearly 5 billion
today. His
conclusion?
"Growth, far from being the normal condition of humanity, is
an
aberration."
This,
Mr. Christian argues, raises important new questions like:
is a
capacity
for spectacular growth something that distinguishes humans
from other
species?
But
many historians remain skeptical. "I strongly doubt that
plate
tectonics
and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of
history," Mr.
Revel said after listening to Mr. Christian's talk at the
convention.
One
reason microhistory became popular in the first place, said
Michael
Steinberg,
a professor of history at Cornell University who was in the
audience,
was
skepticism about older forms of big history, what he called
"large
national
narratives about civilization becoming modern and leaving
barbarism
behind."
A
cheerful,
self-deprecating proselytizer, Mr. Christian is unfazed by
such
objections.
Big history fulfills an important social need, he says. Just
as
creation
myths provided ancient cultures with an account of the
origins of life
and their place in a larger story, big history can provide
the same
service,
although more scientifically.
"Today
nothing
like a modern creation myth is taught," he said. "I think
this is
dangerous.
It means that students never get a sense of reality as a
coherent
whole."
Mr.
Christian, who said he turned to big history not long after
completing
"an incredibly obscure and in retrospect pointless" Ph.D. in
Russian
history,
hopes that a book he is writing on big history, to be
published next
year
by the University of California Press - "a nightmare
project, as you
can
imagine" - will convince some of the skeptics.
"There
is an allergy to the general," he said. "But if historians
don't tell
stories
at the scales of creation myths, someone else will."
Introduction
by Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel I II
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