ABSTRACT
E. H. Carr tracks the evolution of the history discipline in England in the early twentieth century. At one level, his story is of a sustained trend away from the confident realism, positivism, and even universalism of many nineteenth century historical thinkers, towards increasing fragmentation and skepticism. Some of the crucial changes occurred within the history discipline itself. There had always been a few scholars, such as H.G. Wells or Arnold Toynbee, who kept alive the vision of a more capacious understanding of the past. Many interesting consequences flow from big history’s ambitious universalism. Big history recognizes no disciplinary barriers to historical knowledge. It presumes the existence of a whole range of historically oriented disciplines, all of them linked by the same goal: that of reconstructing how world came to be as it is. The big history story is being assembled, like a vast mosaic, using tiles from many different countries, epochs, and scholarly disciplines.
