Purpose

The International Big History Association (IBHA) exists to promote the unified and interdisciplinary study and teaching of the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.

The International Big History Association was established on 20 August 2010, at the Geological Observatory at Coldigioco in Italy, which is run by Alessandro Montanari and Paula Martello.

The Big Historians who met at Coldigioco were David Christian of Macquarie University in Sydney (Australia), Fred Spier of the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), Walter Alvarez of the University of California at Berkeley (USA), Craig Benjamin of Grand Valley State University in Michigan (USA), Cynthia Brown of Dominican University in California (USA), Lowell Gustafson of Villanova University in Pennsylvania (USA), and Barry Rodrigue of the University of Southern Maine (USA). We constituted ourselves as a provisional executive committee and voted in favor of the following initiatives:

1). Establish an international Big History association.

2). Establish an international Big History journal. We plan to have both an electronic and a print journal, and felt that a creative journal name would serve us best. Walter Alvarez is investigating the possibility of it being published by the University of California Press.

3). Establish an international Big History website. On this website, we voted to include an active discussion board and an electronic library/archives of Big History.

4). Hold the first international Big History conference in 2012. We voted to hold this conference at Grand Valley University (Michigan, USA) and thought that late July or early August would be a good date to attract teachers and other educators. Craig Benjamin is organizing this further.