ABSTRACT
Welcome to The Routledge Companion to Big History, a collection of 21 chapters authored by leading proponents in the field on a variety of current topics relevant to big history research and education. The field of big history has been in existence for around a quarter of a century and is practiced today as a coherent form of research and teaching by historians, physicists, geologists, biologists, anthropologists, and other disciplinary specialists around the world. Over the past decade in particular big history has been increasing its academic profile through a variety of new publications, pedagogical innovations, more serious thinking about a research agenda, and through the establishment of the International Big History Association (IBHA). At the same time, big history has also increased its public presence through various high-profile media and web-based outlets, including big history courses produced for The Teaching Company’s Great Courses collection, big history programs produced by the History Channel and Discovery Channel, TED talks, and the involvement of Bill Gates in the creation of the Big History Project (BHP), which has led to more than a thousand schools and hundreds of thousands of high school students around the world taking courses in big history. All these developments mean that the publication of this Routledge Companion to big history comes at a most opportune moment in the evolution of the field.
