ACTIVITY: Scale – History of Me

In this activity, you’ll write a history of yourself, and then you’ll reflect upon the scale at which you examined your own history. This will help show you how your own personal narrative has a lot in common with the much larger Big History narrative.

This activity also introduces the concept of both temporal and spatial scale. This will help you understand why historians will occasionally zoom out (in terms of both time and geography) to create a larger context for understanding a single history.

Take 4 minutes (time yourself!) to write a “history of you”. Do your best, and include whatever you want in your history. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar, this is more about the details of your life.

Ok start writing (and timing yourself) then when you’re done answer the questions below.

You probably wrote about your childhood and your parents. You might have written about your grandparents, but you probably didn’t write about anything more than 100 years ago.

Also, did you write about anything that is further away than the state you’re currently in? Did you talk about anything that’s further away than the country you’re currently in? What is the most distant place you mentioned?

You can’t really think about history without first thinking about the scale at which you’re examining it, so it’s really important. This includes both time scales and spatial scales.

In this course, you’ll use timelines to help with scale, and you’ll also use the language of spatial scale when talking about where things happened in history. The terms personal, local, regional, national, and global will be used to help us think and talk about scales of space. There are many other terms, but those are the ones we’ll use in this course.