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
and Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel


January 1, 2006

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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Lincoln County Oregon Cemeteries
1870 Benton County Oregon Census A-ICensus J-RCensus S-Z
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Wild Women West: One-Eyed CharlieWestern Warrior Women
Black Pioneers Settle Oregon CoastYaquina Bay Oyster Wars
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Murder on the Gold Special: The D'AutremontsTyee View Cemetery
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Cascade Mountain Splendor:Umpqua Valley Photo Works
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Guardino Family Photos Genealogy of the Smiths and Dobbies
Historic Oregon Coast Photo Album


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