| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David Christian. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Foreword by William H. McNeill. (The California World History Library, number 2.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 642. $34.95.
There is no need to tell readers of this journal that teaching, writing, and research in "big history" is enjoying a renaissance. A growing community of "evangelical" scholars, particularly in North America (but latterly in Europe, Russia, Japan, and China) is creating "bridgeheads" into higher education for the revival of a field that can be traced back to Herodotus, persisted for centuries of Christendom, fragmented into national histories after the Reformation, revived briefly during the Enlightenment, maintained a lonely extracurricular presence for more than two centuries of Western imperialism, triumphalism, and geopolitical barbarities, but now challenges historians bunkered in the security of national and local archives (or the condescending sensitivities of postmodernism) to relocate their "provincial" research and epistemological anxieties into metanarratives of universal, global, and world history.	1
Although that aspiration was proclaimed even by Leopold von Ranke ("There is no history but universal history—as it really was") and the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and cultural forces behind current demands for revival of the genre are familiar, questions of what to teach, how to construct courses and write books, and how to undertake research at graduate levels that might be recognized as "professional" by (perhaps?) the most conservative of humanities are still with us. In practice, these problems afflict every other genre of historical writing and research, and, along with other tribes, universal historians can refer to "their tradition" and call upon several deeply erudite and impressive godfathers (Fernand Braudel, Marshall Hodgson, William McNeill, and L. S. Stavrianos) for guidance. The conviction that history departments without universal historians are about as unbalanced as hospitals without cardiologists will grow as talented practitioners committed to the field demonstrate to their students and to historians at large that the subject must and can be taught at graduate levels.	. . .

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