The History Manifesto

by Jo Guldi, David Armitage

How should historians speak truth to power – and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history – especially long-term history – so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialisation, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated. This provocative and thoughtful book makes an important intervention in the debate about the role of history and the humanities in a digital age. It will provoke discussion among policymakers, activists and entrepreneurs as well as ordinary listeners, viewers, readers, students and teachers. This title is also available as Open Access.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, School, Academic, Science

176 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2014

Reviews

[Sense of History]

Rating 2.5 stars. Looking at the avalanche of reactions on this Manifesto Guldi and Armitage surely succeeded in drawing attention to their message. And reading the manifest I guess any one immediately will have both positive and negative comments. To me – I’m an amateur-historian, not an academic one – the feelings were very mixed and even contradictory.

1. There’s nothing against historians "going public" and trying to get the ear of policy makers at all levels; on the contrary, historians and social scientists in general should definitely be heard much more on the issues that matter today; so I absolutely agree with the basic intention of Guldi and Armitage.
The question is: how should historians do that? Some would say: by just doing their job, looking at the most different aspects of history, scrupulously applying the critical method, and publishing the results in all transparency. All right, sure. But should they focus on topics that are ‘relevant’ for today or not? And should they limit their energy to an academic public, or should they try to get the attention of decision makers, or of the widest possible public? Difficult questions, indeed. Personally I’m inclined to answer yes on both accounts. But at the same time, I’m aware of the dangers of ‘presentism’ and of ‘vulgarization’. A lot of historians are doing very valuable work, just limiting themselves to academic subjects and an academic public, and we ought to respect them for that. But I share the sense of urgency of the History Manifesto to make historical research more relevant indeed.

2. That historians in the last century narrowed their focus too much (geographically, chronologically or thematically), is a hypothesis that I – instinctively – support. But on this point Guldi and Armitage have received a lot of criticism by other historians. They have shown - their own statistics in hand - that their allegation is not correct, and that already since the 1970’s the historical focus has become wider and wider (which actually shows that you have to be very careful with statistical data).
Personally, I regret that Guldi and Armitage almost completely ignored the wave of publications in the field of Global/World/Big/Connected/Transnational- /Environmental History (etc). In their answer on the critical responses to the manifesto they admitted that their allegation indeed was exaggerated.

3. I still have issues with their very explicit proposition that only “the longue durée” and the use of Big Data can make historical research relevant again. You don’t have to convince me of the value of a broader time scale, I'm a big fan of Global/World/Big/etc. -research (see my reading list). But in the meantime, I have also noticed that a wider chronological period not automatically equals greater relevance. At that point in their manifesto Guldi and Armitage also nuance their stance, and they point to the value of studies in the field of "micro-history", though in other places again they are very disparaging about the “Short Past”-craze. So, their position on this point is rather contradictory.

4. And then there is the use of Big Data or the quantitative approach to history. I still am very torn about this. Already in the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a first attempt to quantify history studies, but that failed almost completely, as also Guldi an Armitage point out. But quite rightly they state that in the meantime the world has profoundly changed and that there is much more possible since the digital revolution and the rise of Big Data. I don't doubt that is correct, and also the fiercest critics of the History Manifesto agree. But I’m still struggling with the methodological implications of that Big Data approach: how are the data selected, how are they digitalized, how can you correlate them correctly, can you really digitalize everything, etc? Guldi and Armitage do not provide any answers on these important questions.

5. That historians are much more familiar with the time factor and therefore very trained in causality and even in the problematic side of causal relationships is evident. But putting all economists, sociologists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists on the side of amateurism (as the History Manifesto does) is downright unfair. Guldi and Armitage in each case have a point that historians indeed have something to say on causality, but I wouldn’t overrate that.

6. what worries me most in the History Manifesto is that again and again Guldi and Armitage stress that historians should look to the future as much as to the past. They are a bit ambivalent about this: in some places they contend that studying the past offers a better insight in how there were always different options and thus that the future never is/was determined, but in other places I have the impression that they really want to discover patterns and laws, suggesting a kind of determinism in history. Personally, I think historians really should abstain of speaking about the future.

7. The list of possible comments can still be made much longer, but just one final note here on the tone and style of the manifesto. A manifest must be sharp, that’s particular to the genre, but to my taste Guldi and Armitage definitely go over the edge, a bit like college students would do (it's rather childish in the 21st Century to begin and end a manifesto with a nearly literal repeat of the start- and end words of the famous Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, 1848). Their message sometimes is very repetitive and also contradictory, and often very offending for other historians and social scientists. And that is a pity, because – fundamentally – the issues our world is facing today, are worth also to get the attention of historians.

Still, I very much recommend the reading of the manifesto, and of its critiques. Because it really helps to understand the challenges historians and other human scientists face in our time. It’s all on the open net, just use your search engine.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

The History Manifesto was published in October 2014 and immediately provoked an avalanche of positive and negative reactions. Mission accomplished for Guldi and Armitage, because with a manifesto you want to provoke some reaction and they did indeed. What follows is not a review, but a brief summary (below I’ll explain why).

Guldi and Armitage argue for making the historical métier relevant again (and by that they mean mainly the organized, academic historical research). According to them, historians in the second half of the 20th century started to focus on ever more specialized subjects, over a very limited time scale. And that is why they left the public field to economists, sociologists and anthropologists, because those people are now making the show in institutions that matter (international, national, supranational) and usually have a direct line with policy makers in all possible sectors. The historians must therefore "go public" again, and according to Guldi and Armitage they can do this in three ways: 1. by focusing on issues that matter today, in particular climate change, growing inequality and the global governance crisis; 2. By focusing more on the "longue durée" in their research, a term that naturally they derive from the renowned French historian Fernand Braudel; with a broader time scale they mean much broader than the 5 to 50 years that – according to them – now is the norm, and they even suggest to go to 500 years if possible; 3. Guldi and Armitage argue for working as quantitatively as possible in that timescale and utilizing all the possibilities of the world of the Big Data; because only in this way really relevant conclusions can be drawn for the future. Finally, they stress that historians can play an essential role in the Big Data revolution, because they are the only ones (read: in contrast to social scientists) who can handle the time factor in a responsible manner.

I know I left out some nuances, but that are the laws of a short summary, and since Guldi and Armitage use a fairly direct style, I don’t think they would object. I suspect that reading this summary you immediately had both positive and negative comments. I did too. But because this review would become too long, I refer to my History-alias on Goodreads where I summed up my comments (see link https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, I should declare a strong interest. As a publisher of History books, I shall admit to having found the eye watering narrowness of some research topics to have been an issue when attempting to commission books that enough people want to read since starting in the job a few years ago – to the extent that my exhortations to academics to widen the scope of what they write about might make me come across as some kind of pointy headed Michael Gove-type monster. Indeed, one of the chapters here is entitled The Bonfire of the Humanities and the dissertation pursued by Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon, ‘The Economic Influence of the Development of Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450-1485’ is cited as an example of how the activities of archive crawlers are often held up to ridicule.

So the broad attempt of this ‘Manifesto’ calling on historians to try and achieve wider public relevance and to aim more for the broad view was appealing to me. By and large, Guldi and Armitage carry off the task with brio – a central chapter on the retreat of the profession from long-term thinking is well mounted – and in such a way that the authors are never sniffy or dismissive of more specialist approaches. That said, they clearly do feel that historians have to assert themselves better, having left the field clear for economists to hold sway as the chief government advisers ever since the hegemony of Thatcher and Reagan. As someone who worked for a long time commissioning economics books, I enjoyed the way the authors are able to highlight what they think is significant from that discipline – Geoffrey Hodgson, an author I know well, is rightly afforded a mention despite the fact that most neoclassical economists will surely not know who he is.

Climate change is also a central concern – and rightly so – and the general argument for longer term thinking is very convincing. Yes, the book is quite fusty in places – Cambridge University Press don’t tend to guide their authors and so the temptation to play to an audience of academic peers via copious references is there – while the book sums up a situation which, in 2014, seemed immutable but which has now been blown apart by the uncertainties of Brexit, Trump, Covid and other ills. It does remain relevant though – and a move from History as a discipline to move back towards the Big Picture already seems underway.

3 stars rather than more only because this is a website for 'good reads' which this isn't - but it's still well worth the time of anyone interested in a macro view of an academic discipline.

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

there is no way i would’ve read this if not for class.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I sympathized with the main arguments of this book but didn't find it terribly coherent, persuasive, or revelatory. The book features a series of arguments that add up to a guide for modern historians on how and why to engage in public debates about issues like climate change, inequality, and governance. They start by arguing that much of early-mid 20th century history was shaped by Braudel-style longue duree history that investigated macro-trends through wide-angle lenses. This fell out of fashion in 60's and 70's when micro-histories dominated by culture, class, gender, and race became dominant in the discipline. Their explanation for this shift was interesting. Obviously it was linked to the social justice movements of this era and to the various "turns" (cultural, linguistic, transnational) etc. It was also a product of the vast surge in the number of Ph.D students emerging from the expansion of educational opportunity following WWII. This created an incentive to "write more and more and less and less" in order to fill in gaps in existing scholarships. Longue Duree history became to be seen as not only untenable for young researchers, but even a bit oppressive: part of buying in to grand or master narratives centered around the nation and powerful political/economic actors at the expense of everyone else.

While they grant that the rise of micro-history was necessary and illuminating, they also argue that it had a few major downsides. It made historians less equipped for participating in the long-term debates that every society has, for questions like "Why is their persisting inequality?" or "How should we best understand the relationship between people and the environment?" They argue that historians should be best equipped to answer these questions for several reasons but that short-term thinking dominant in the academy inhibits this. 1. Historians should be able to evaluate Big Data arguments, figuring out the contexts in which data is collected and sussing out the responsible uses of historical data from irresponsible ones. 2. Historians can show how certain concepts or institutions are not eternal but constructed in real time by conscious actors and interactions. This can help us get away from macro-explanations of things like inequality that rely on iron laws of economic behavior. 3 Historians can present much more complex, multi-perspectival accounts of big questions that economists or other commentators.

The authors' arguments here would have been stronger if they had not caricatured the work of economists and other social scientists and actually spent the time to refute some of their claims in extended case studies. The authors' rely heavily on the idea that the job of a scholar is to confront and "destabilize" powerful people and institutions, which puts them very much in the micro-history camp they also criticize. Overall, I just didn't get a strong sense of the type of history they wanted other than the general synthesis, which appears to exist in droves already. So you could say I agreed with the individual pieces of this argument (it definitely helped explain many of the arguments I've had in graduate school about how best to conduct historical research) but they didn't add up to a persuasive, forceful conclusion.

This would be a good book for people taking their comps in fields like social, environmental, and global history. As someone with a more traditional historical methodology and little time for theory, I found the book less enlightening. Doesn't hold a candle to other investigations of the historian's craft and role in society, especially Gaddis' outstanding "Landscape of History."

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pre-reading for Uni.
A nice short re-introduction into some theoretical concepts and an overlook of historical approaches. Was a bit boring about all the climate stuff like I get ur point but overall not too shabby.

[Vladimir · Rating 3 out of 5]

«Un fantasma recorre nuestra época: el fantasma del corto plazo». Así se abre el Manifiesto por la Historia del británico David Armitage (1965) y la norteamericana Jo Guldi (1978), un libro que levantó polémica cuando se publicó en acceso abierto en 2014 y hoy conviene releer a la luz de las circunstancias, pues, como afirman los autores, el pensamiento cortoplacista no causa demasiados problemas hasta que impera en una crisis. Por eso nunca hasta ahora ha sido tan importante que todos recobremos la visión a largo plazo, «que todos regresemos a la longue durée».

La reseña completa, aquí: https://chs.hypotheses.org/1056.

[Antonio Gallo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pubblicato in open access nel 2014 dagli storici statunitensi David Armitage e Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto ha innescato un intenso dibattito internazionale, a dimostrazione dell’importanza cruciale del tema affrontato: quale ruolo pubblico ha la storia nel mondo contemporaneo? La disciplina può ancora essere rilevante nella formazione delle classi dirigenti? Gli storici hanno qualche possibilità di scuotere “le tranquille certezze dei cittadini, dei responsabili politici e dei potenti”? Per rispondere a queste domande, il manifesto di Armitage-Guldi si articola lungo tre concetti chiave: in primo luogo, l’identificazione della longue durée come prospettiva metodologica in grado di condurre la storia fuori dallo stato di subalternità disciplinare, politica e accademica in cui sarebbe caduta; in secondo luogo, la condanna senza riserve della “microstoria” e dello short-termism, individuati come principali responsabili dell’emarginazione della storia dal discorso pubblico e politico; infine, l’assunzione metodologica dei big data come sorgente rivivificante per una storiografia transnazionale e trans-temporale in grado di affrontare in chiave anti-teleologica e anti-deterministica i cogenti temi della disuguaglianza economica, del cambiamento climatico e della governance internazionale.

Ma quale livello di attendibilità hanno queste assunzioni? Davvero la storia è in crisi? E questa crisi ha realmente i tratti delineati dall’History Manifesto? Partiamo dal primo punto, la fortuna (o meno) della longue durée. Come hanno dimostrato Deborah Cohen e Peter Mandler nell’aspra recensione pubblicata sull’“American Historical Review” (AHR Exchange), i dati di Benjamin Schmidt su cui si fonda l’assioma iniziale di Armitage-Guldi – la crisi della storia come frutto dell’abbandono della “lunga durata” da parte degli storici – non sembrano affatto supportare le conclusioni dei due autori dell’History Manifesto. Anzi. Lo studio di Schmidt sugli archi cronologici di circa ottomila tesi di dottorato pubblicate negli Stati Uniti a partire dal 1880 mostra un aumento costante delle lunghezze temporali a partire dalla metà degli anni sessanta. E nessuna inflessione emerge negli anni duemila, laddove invece – secondo Armitage e Guldi – si sarebbe dovuto registrare un “ritorno” alla lunga durata. Cohen e Mandler hanno inoltre tentato di verificare questa tendenza analizzando le recensioni pubblicate dall’“AHR” in otto anni campione nel corso di ottant’anni, scegliendo rispettivamente quattro anni inclusi nella long-horizon history di Armitage-Guldi (1926, 1936, 1956 e 1966) e altri quattro in quella che gli autori del manifesto hanno definito come l’era dello Short Past (1976, 1986, 1996, 2006). E anche in questo caso i risultati sono chiari: dopo il 1975, gli anni coperti dagli oltre 1100 libri recensiti sono aumentati con continuità, e la mediana è più che raddoppiata dal 1966 al 1986. A conclusioni simili è pervenuta Claire Lemercier per il caso francese, a partire da una base dati rappresentata dalle tesi di dottorato catalogate dal Conseil National des universités. Prendendo in esame non soltanto le date presenti nei titoli (1939-1945, ad esempio), ma anche le designazioni più generali (ad esempio, Ancien régime oppure époque coloniale), Lemercier ha ricostruito un quadro molto più sfumato e complesso, in cui soltanto il 20 per cento dei lavori copre un arco cronologico inferiore.

Se dunque uno spettro si aggira davvero per la nostra epoca, esso non sembra avere le sembianze del breve termine. Le evidenze quantitative – tanto care ai due autori – vanno in tutt’altra direzione. Ma cosa s’intende per “breve termine”, fonte – secondo Armitage e Guldi – di tutti i mali in cui sarebbe piombata la disciplina a partire dal 1968 fino almeno al 2000? Senza alcuno scavo nella storia della storiografia nei decenni centrali del Novecento, l’History Manifesto invoca le politiche identitarie degli anni settanta, o la rivolta edipica delle giovani generazioni di storici contro i “padri” troppo coinvolti nelle istituzioni, o ancora la contrazione del mercato del lavoro universitario, per attaccare una “microstoria” definita in termini assai vaghi, quando non ridicolizzata come studio iper-sofisticato di un esemplare particolare del passato o scavo archivistico fine a se stesso. Fino a generalizzazioni che suonano così: “A parte poche eccezioni, le classiche ricerche condotte negli anni settanta, ottanta e novanta si concentravano su un particolare episodio: l’individuazione di uno specifico disturbo psicologico, ad esempio, oppure l’analisi di una particolare sommossa di lavoratori”. Quasi che i lavori di Natalie Zemon Davis, di Robert Darnton, o di Joan Wallach Scott fossero riducibili a meri scavi di eventi di modeste dimensioni, e non costituissero invece fondamentali mutamenti di prospettiva, tanto metodologica quanto interpretativa. L’interpretazione di questa fase storiografica come di un’unica, indistinta ritirata dall’ampio respiro della longue durée contrasta poi con elementi fattuali quali l’emergere, nello stesso periodo, della global history, della storia ambientale, o di una storia della scienza e della tecnologia sempre più interessate alle scale temporali lunghe. E anche l’impatto politico del cultural turn nell’ambito della battaglia per i diritti civili, nella preservazione dell’ambiente o nella lotta al razzismo e all’antisemitismo (per citare solo alcuni esempi), dagli anni sessanta a oggi, rimane del tutto in sordina in queste pagine.

Il riferimento conclusivo ai big data e al rapporto tra digital history e longue durée non migliora il quadro. Basandosi essenzialmente su Ngram Viewer e su Paper Machines (un’estensione open source di Zotero), ovvero su strumenti di digitalizzazione di ampi corpi testuali, i due autori di fatto celebrano i potenziali benefici della “lettura a distanza” teorizzata da Franco Moretti, senza tuttavia esplorare le profonde questioni metodologiche già introdotte dalla storia quantitativa francese negli anni ottanta e novanta. Perché il distant reading abbia reale efficace probativa, è infatti necessario costruire adeguatamente un corpus testuale che risponda a una precisa ipotesi di ricerca, non basta accumulare e amalgamare il più ampio numero possibile di testi. Al contrario, occorre risolvere i rischi di anacronismo connessi all’insuperabile storicità delle categorie analizzate nel lungo periodo e sviluppare una riflessione teorica sui modelli di causalità e temporalità. Non dialogando metodologicamente con gli scienziati sociali e con gli economisti; inventandosi l’equivalenza “lungo = significativo”; e occultando completamente la rilevanza della public history a livello internazionale, il manifesto di Armitage-Guldi assume i contorni di un’invocazione anacronistica, incapace da un lato di individuare i termini strutturali della crisi in corso, e dall’altro di valorizzare la ricchezza e le potenzialità effettive della disciplina. Le ultime battute vanno all’edizione italiana.

Bene ha fatto Donzelli a tradurre un libro che ha circolato molto all’interno della comunità degli storici, ma che meritava di essere portato a conoscenza del vasto pubblico dei “non addetti ai lavori”. E la ricca introduzione di Renato Camurri istituisce abilmente alcune connessioni con i dibattiti interni alla storiografia italiana. Ma se un aspetto positivo dell’History Manifesto è proprio da individuarsi nella critica alla parossistica moda delle “svolte” storiografiche degli ultimi decenni, la sua lettura non può che risultare assai straniante alla luce di un contesto storiografico come quello italiano, nel quale le suddette “svolte” hanno avuto vita breve o sono ancora scarsamente riconosciute, con una “storia sociale” ormai in via di estinzione, una “storia culturale” a tutt’oggi fortemente discriminata, una “storia globale” priva delle risorse necessarie al suo pieno sviluppo. In questa situazione, abbiamo davvero bisogno di un Manifesto così presentista e futurologico?

David Armitage e Jo Guldi
MANIFESTO PER LA STORIA
Il ruolo del passato nel mondo d’oggi
ed. orig. 2014, trad. dall’inglese di David Scaffei
pp. 262, € 22
Donzelli, Roma 2016

18 luglio 2017 - “L’Indice dei libri del mese”
Francesco Cassata (insegna storia contemporanea all’Università di Genova)

[Floris · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage make a simple but powerful argument: we live in an age of short-termism, which is hampering our ability to deal with ever-worsening crises; historians suffer from the same short-termist thinking; historians have the potential to help tackle these crises if they focus more on long-term history-writing. The book obviously offers more than just this line of argument. It provides an account of the origins of longue-durée history-writing in the twentieth century. It argues that this style of scholarship fell out of favour as we neared the twenty-first century. It demonstrates ways in which historical scholarship contributes to public debates, even if it does so poorly. And it maintains that big data is the way forward for historians to engage better in these public debates, setting the standards for interpreting this kind of data and acting as “arbiters” of such knowledge derived from these datasets. The book is short, polemical, and very to-the-point. However, what makes it punchy is also what makes it somewhat flawed. Since its release in 2014, it has come under criticism from various historians unhappy with the way the authors interpret their data about shortening timespans in history PhD dissertations, the way they downplay contributions to public debates by scholars from other disciplines, and the way they assume that the longue-durée necessarily means greater relevance for public debate. I might also add the way their focus on Anglophone scholarship obscures potential trends elsewhere. On the other hand, many historians have looked past these valid critiques and embraced the book’s call to (longer) arms.

For all its reductionism, The History Manifesto has probably done more good than harm to the discipline of history. It speaks to a desire of relevance for academic historians, and marks out a path for pursuing it. It offers a coloured but sharp critique of professional history-writing which – even if not entirely fair or representative of the entire discipline – is still useful to think with. I would probably agree with critics of the book that the authors overplay the crisis of short-termism, and take a narrow-minded approach to solving it. Nevertheless, I also agree with the authors’ underlying wish to see more long-term perspectives. This does not necessarily mean histories that span multiple centuries, as these can still be written with a micro-historical lens (this is where the authors could have done more to question whether the date-ranges in titles of PhD dissertations are truly indicative of long- or short-term perspectives). Rather, seeing more historical work situated in contexts that span such long-timescales, and seeing more historical work that is oriented towards public crises and debates, can only be a positive thing. I’m therefore inclined to be more lenient; the message is sound, even if the delivery isn’t.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clippings

The Greek historian Thucydides, for example, began his history of the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Spartans with the notion that his history should be useful, and that it would be useful because human nature itself was unchanging: the evidence of the past could therefore be certain to prove helpful to the future.

Like Alfred Thayer Mahan before them, historians of the 1960s and 1970s could depend upon policy-makers as an audience, and that was a rationale for staying general. Indeed, in at least one major subfield – military history – historians remain attached to the military schools and naval colleges that commission them to instruct future generals in strategy and international relations.21 Military history remains for this reason one of the last outposts of long-term history in a short-term world.

military writings were among the earliest sources of counterfactual thinking in the eighteenth century as strategic thinkers gamed out multiple possibilities, or that the earliest counterfactual novel in 1836 was about Napoleon and the ‘conquest of the

military writings were among the earliest sources of counterfactual thinking in the eighteenth century as strategic thinkers gamed out multiple possibilities, or that the earliest counterfactual novel in 1836 was about Napoleon and the ‘conquest of the world’.

Climate change, evolutionary anthropology, and economics may well paint a self-portrait of the species as a victim of its selfish genes, of DNA that instructs us towards greed and exploitation no matter what, but history and anthropology are always reminding us of the variety of human values and forms of mutual aid.

The Short Past produced the fundamentalist school of narrowing time horizons called ‘micro-history’. Micro-history largely abandoned grand narrative or moral instruction in favour of focus on a particular event: for example, the shame-inducing charivaris of early modern France analysed by Natalie Zemon Davis or the mystifying cat massacres of eighteenth-century Paris unpacked by Robert Darnton.20 Micro-history had originated in Italy as a method for testing longue-durée questions, in reaction to the totalising theories of Marxism and the Annales School.

The evidence seemed to suggest that poor people were gaining in nutrition over the century – in general, prisoners in 1867 were nutritionally better off than prisoners in 1812.60 But a decade later, some British economists reconsidered the data, having spent some time reading up on British social history. The data confirmed, counter to the original thesis, that the weight of working-class women actually went down over the course of the Industrial Revolution. What we now understand is that the mothers and wives of working-class men had been starving themselves – skipping meals, passing on the bigger serving – to make sure that their mill-working or ship-loading husbands had enough energy to survive their industrial jobs.

The ‘Anthropocene’ was first proposed as a concept in 2000 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, who identified the era as a new epoch in terms of planetary geology, comparable to the Holocene or Paleocene in its difference from previous epochs.11 As Australian historian Libby Robin records, Crutzen’s intervention ‘was a bold statement on many levels’, not least because it was the first geological epoch ever proposed that included the future – the accumulated effects of anthropogenic activity – as well as the past.12 The label immediately resulted in a historical debate over whether the effects of climate change began 250 years ago with the steam engine, eleven thousand years ago with the rise of human hunter civilisations and the extinction of animals, or five to eight thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution.

The genre of history illustrated by Robin, Yates, and Thompson is critical history at its finest. They identify the players who are constructing the game; they show where the terms came from, and they point out contradictions in the system. Critical history is one of the forms of story-telling that most historians today are trained to perform. Critical history can help us to tell which logics to keep for the future and which to throw away. Stamped with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, critical history is the child of the 1970s just as much as micro-history is, although it has a rich legacy going back at least to Karl Marx.

The power of this data to transform argument has been graphically illustrated by the debates about long-term economic inequality under capitalism awakened by the publication of economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).57 Piketty explains in his introduction that his prompt for gathering longue-durée data about inequality was when he was told a statement that most economists accept as law: Kuznets’ assertion that capitalism would, over time, tend to reduce inequality.58 Kuznets based his principle on a few decades of data, not centuries, as Piketty would later, and this data came from an exceptional period in economic history – the period of post-depression and postwar recovery

‘Women and the Plough’, an economics article in a prestigious journal, tells us that modern gender roles have structured our genes and our preferences since the institution of agriculture.56 ‘Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 BC?’ asks another.57 Evolutionary biology, much like economics, has also been a field where an abundance of data nevertheless has only been read towards one or two hypotheses about human agency. The blame is placed on humans as a species, or on agriculture, or on the discovery of fire. Our genes have been blamed for our systems of hierarchy and greed, for our gender roles, and for the exploitation of the planet itself. And yet gender roles and systems of hierarchy show enormous variations in human history. When some scholars talk in this way of unchanging rules inherited from hunter-gatherer ancestors, they themselves may forget, persuaded by the bulk of accumulated evidence, that their theory, translated via Darwin and Malthus, remains at its core a philosophy which reasons that an unchanging earth gave to all of its creatures, humankind included, stable patterns of action, which they defied at their peril. In the world of the evolutionary biologist and neo-liberal economist, the possibility of choosing and curating multiple futures itself seems to disappear. These are reductionist fictions about our past and future merely masquerading as data-supported theories; the historian notices that they are also outmoded ones. At other times, the repeated story instructs us about how to govern our society and deal with other people. When economists and political scientists talk about Malthusian limits to growth, and how we have passed the ‘carrying capacity’ of our planet, historians recognise that they are rehearsing not a proven fact, but a fundamentally theological argument. Modern economists have removed the picture of an abusive God from their theories, but their theory of history is still at root an early nineteenth-century one, where the universe is designed to punish the poor, and the experience of the rich is a sign of their obedience to natural laws.58 Today, anthropologists can point to the evidence of many societies, past and present, where the divisions of class are not expressed in terms of ejectment or starvation.

[Neville Buch]

In one line, and from my own interest, the book argues the main point that “historians can be guardians against parochial perspectives and endemic short-termism.” [p. 125] Armitage & Guldi opening gambit is [p. 13]:

“History’s power to liberate, we argue, ultimately lies in explaining where things came from, tacking between big processes and small events to see the whole picture, and reducing a lot of information to a small and shareable version. We recommend these methods to a society plagued by false ideas about the past and how it limits our collective hopes for the future.”

There are several places in the book where Armitage & Guldi sum up the points of their argument, but I thought there comment in the concluding chapter on the three new trends in the writing of history did it the best [p. 117]:

“first, a need for new narratives capable of being read, understood, and engaged by non-experts;
second, an emphasis on visualisation and digital tools; and
third, a fusion between the big and the small, the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’, that harnesses the best of archival work on the one hand and big-picture work about issues of common concern on the other.”

I encourage you to read sections of the book to get the full sense of these themes. I think this is what we should be doing in our local histories, in our family histories, in our institutional histories, and in various state or global histories.

The big mistake to make about The History Manifesto is to believe that it dismisses the place and value of micro-history. What the book is calling for is a marriage of macro and micro work [pp. 119, 120, 121]. The key problem for the authors is “micro-history that fails to reconnect to larger narratives, and to state frankly what it hopes to overturn and what to uphold, may court antiquarianism” [p. 121.]
As professional historians, there is always the tension between the virtue of public mission and the virtue of the scholarship. This is wonderfully captured by Armitage & Guldi in a paragraph which lists different features of our ‘human science’ but to which seems to get out of balance as having one virtue, others are mute or missing in action [p. 124].

The 'take-home lesson' is that “Knowledge of the past is therefore a source for understanding the extent to which we have free will in the future.” [p. 31]

[Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modeled in form upon The Communist Manifesto, this is a clever attempt to call historians as a professional class back to public and academic relevancy, or rather back to their erstwhile preeminence as arbiters of public perception and political advisement. I wholeheartedly agree with the goals and premises of the book for one simple reason: Our present is entirely a product of our past.

This treatise explores the division between micro- and macro-history and gives a history of their respective historiographies. As someone given to macro-thought, I was informed about the tremendous value that micro-history has in fact provided the discipline, to wit: "All of these refinements to our understanding of watershed moments are built upon a deep foundation of micro-historical research" on pg. 36. The authors also quote Kingsley Amis in humorously critiquing the excesses, or perhaps costs, of an exclusive focus on micro-history: "It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, it funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems" on pg. 50.

Economists have attempted to imperialize history as they have attempted with all other social sciences, but there are reasons why this is impossible in the case of history, e.g. "Data are abused when they are examined as a single facet of historical experience. Both positive and negative assessments from the past from economics abstract single dimensions of experience--wages, the price of grain, or height--as a proxy for freedom, democracy or happiness" on pg. 59. Instead, "History, with its rich, material understanding of human experience and institutions and its apprehension of multiple causality, is reentering the arena of long-term discussions of time where evolutionary biologists, archaeologists, climate scientists, and economists have long been the only protagonists. Today, we desperately need an arbiter for these mythological histories, capable of casting out prejudice, reestablishing consensus about the actual boundaries of the possible, and in so doing opening up a wider future and destiny for modern civilizations" on pg. 87.

[Valorie Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book by David Armitage and Jo Guldi. Guldi and Armitage bring to light some interesting ideas about the way we think of history, and how the professionalization of history has impacted the way historians approach research. It's richly annotated and researched. Guldi and Armitage propose that we've been thinking, writing, and researching in increasingly short time spans for too long. They are worried that the lack of focus on long-term trends (think: more than 50 years, more than 100) means we've lost access to a whole trove of knowledge. When we don't focus on anything longer than 10 years, everything seems like a crisis and everything seems brand new. But in history, there are examples of almost everything we're going through (sure, with minor tweaks to incorporate things like nukes and meme culture). We don't have access to them and to healthy comparisons of those moments with today because history departments have ceded their duty as a record-holders.

This proposal feels very prescient and worrying especially now, in the age of governance via twitter. This book should be required reading for everyone studying history, and I wish it was written in an accessible enough way to be easy reading for non-historians to be interested in the concept of the longue duree that Guldi and Armitage support.

That said, the only reason why I haven't given this manifesto five stars is that I felt like it was too long. I never thought I'd accuse something of being over-researched, but I do think this book would have had more mainstream traction (which I think would be instructive for society at large) if there was actually less support for their theory. It took me so long to read this book in part because I would get lost in the weeds a bit. For instance, it's easy to forget in the midst of their longitudinal study of the way climate science has been publicized that this book is about history, not climate change.

Nevertheless, if you're willing to wade in a bit deeper than usual, this book is a good starting point to understanding the role history used to play in society, and the role it should start to play again.

[Charles Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this, and have to think about my review . The book was both infuriating and thought provoking at the same time. I found myself agreeing with, engaged and excited about the author's points while later wondering what the hell they were talking about. As I have also just finished "Hamilton's Republic" I found myself comparing the two, the lessons available thru the study of history. A fuller review requires some thought and clarity about how I really feel, though I gave it 4 stars just because it made all of this thinking necessary . : to be continued .......

[Arne Geybels · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must read for historians or people interested in the importance of history in our technological societies. A call to arms to use 'Longue Durée' or a longer chronological view to study/improve/understand phenomena. The book touches on important issues like global change, democracy and capitalism.

[Ben McFarland · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot more academics call for better public engagement and more creative academic thinking than actually do better public engagement and more creative academic thinking. The History Manifesto practices what it preaches. As an academic (far) outside the field of history, I was able to digest this short book easily and to grasp the authors' description of the movements of thought in the field -- the history of history.


They argue that in the latter half of the 20th century, long-term history gave way to focused microhistories, and that long-term history is coming back. They don't argue that microhistories should go away, but that the tools developed for such deep-dives into archival materials can now be applied to longer spans of time and bigger datasets. Microhistory in massive parallel, if you will.


I think they're right, and I especially appreciate the well-chosen examples of what they're talking about. As a chemist who constantly strays into geological and biological history, I am all for the parallel movement in natural history (although I was hoping to find a little more inspiration for my own natural history thoughts than I did here). If anything, their critiques of evolutionary biology should be more intense.


The only thing that tugs at me is a sense that they already know where their field will lead -- that the conclusions of new history will take down the ideas of those rival laissez-faire economists who always show up as dramatic foils in this narrative. Awareness of your own biases is crucial when designing these new historical studies and this book is more about inspiring new methods than in cautioning on the wrong turns that can be taken when implementing new methods. They're basically arguing that "cliometrics" should return as a data-driven historical field of study (while arguing that the ones really qualified to interpret such data must be trained historians) but they also honestly present the fact that the first studies to use this term back in the 70s were embarrassingly flawed. Why were they flawed? I would like to dig down more into how these flaws can be prevented from happening. Most of all, I want to be surprised by the data, so "knowing the result before it starts" is something to avoid.


The only reason I can even make a critique like that is because this book genuinely talks about important and foundational issues, and that's the sign of a good book.

[Pascal Scallon-Chouinard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 2014, this book has generated much interest and discussion. The History Manifesto argues for the strong return of history as a reference and authority in the public domain. The authors claim that historians have given way to other specialists in the political arena by overspecializing and focusing on limited spatiotemporal analysis. To regain their place, historians would have to turn their attention to contemporary issues and replace them in the longue durée and macro-history, notably by taking advantage of new technologies that would make it possible to get rid of the “cult” of the archive and offer material – data – that can be easily and efficiently exploited for and by historians.

This manifesto poses pertinent questions and opens the way to real reflection on the discipline of history, the role of history and the historians, and the production of history. However, the criticism it has aroused, particularly in the French-speaking historical community, is understandable. The manifesto’s premise – the omnipresence of short-termism – doesn’t hold up so well when you consider that the longue durée hasn’t really suffered a setback in historical studies. And it is not like short-term history and specialized studies haven’t shown their relevance to explore and explain the society. The authors’ tendency to place the discipline and historians themselves above all else, as if they were the only ones truly able to offer contextual analyses, also sounds elitist and overlooks the importance of multidisciplinary approaches. And the way they present their view and take on technology sound to me like a good way to offer, in the end, to offer a technocratic version of history, devoid of intuition and emotion, which focuses exclusively on the data itself, without taking into account its provenance or the context in which it was produced.

In short, while thought-provoking, this manifesto is, in my view, far from convincing.

[Marcos Alarcon Olivos · Rating 3 out of 5]

El manifiesto es un género potente debido a su performatividad: es avezado, promisorio y hasta utópico. ¿Puede un manifiesto por la historia llegar a ser conservador?

The History Manifesto, publicado en el 2014, puso en discusión la necesidad de que la disciplina retome dos características que la habían definido hasta la década del sesenta: el retorno de la larga duración en las narrativas del pasado y el involucramiento de los historiadores en el debate público.

El libro traza bien la historia y las implicaciones heurísticas y políticas detrás de las narrativas de larga y corta duración (la monografía, la microhistoria, etc.). La especialización de la disciplina en el siglo XX no solo cambió los marcos temporales de la exploración del pasado en pos de producir estudios intensivos sobre algún tema o periodo. Produjo también la retracción de los historiadores del debate y la administración públicos en favor de otras disciplinas. La economía se volvió el lenguaje de la administración y sus agentes, los tecnócratas. Es el mundo en el que aún vivimos.

En lo que que el libro queda corto es en su carácter de manifiesto y su conservadurismo político. El manifiesto es un género potente debido, en parte, a su performatividad: es avezado, promisorio y hasta utópico. La promesa de un nuevo mundo a través del llamado político. Pero el mundo que Guldi y Armitage advocan y el rol que le otorgan a la historia en ello a través de la recuperación de la larga duración es uno reformista y conservador. La historia sería la disciplina que combatiría los mitos en los que se basa el neoliberalismo y serviría para desarrollar políticas públicas más inclusivas. Pero la historia puede ser más que una herramienta de gobernabilidad: una vía de politización ciudadana, un espacio de energías del que podamos tomar las fuerzas del pasado, como decía Thompson.

[Rodrigo Pinillos Osnayo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un texto orientado más para historiadores, científicos sociales y académicos, pero que no deja de tener interés para otros interesados en la Historia, como ciencia social y como herramienta orientadora de las decisiones (mayormente públicas).

Pros: una defensa del hacer historia desde una perspectiva longue durée (y una crítica en todo el texto al cortoplacismo - sea para la historia, sea para enmarcar políticas); una defensa también del espacio y uso público de la Historia (y una crítica al academicismo de los estancos, la sobre-especialización y la generación de historia sólo para otros historiadores), defensa además para el espacio de los historiadores frente a otros profesionales sociales; una perspectiva de la Universidad como la institución baluarte para cautelar una mirada de largo plazo frente a políticos y otros actores excesivamente centrados en el aquí y el ahora; y adicionalmente, una profusa bibliografía (siempre se agradecen las buenas referencias para otros autores).

Cons: el texto se hace árido por pasajes (al menos desde la perspectiva de alguien que no es historiador de profesión); hay un marcado sesgo ideológico en las apreciaciones de los autores frente a algunos temas de doctrina política/económica y a temas como el cambio climático - nada de ello invalida los argumentos centrales y es lo esperable además en algo llamado "manifiesto": una postura íntima y personalísima frente a un tema, sobre todo tan importante como la Historia.

[Juan Agustín Otero · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that is hard not to read as a corporative defense of history, if not as an academic cry of despair. Aesthetically and politically bland, this left-oriented manifesto calls for a history concerned with the long-term. But I think the authors are wrong about their thesis. The problem is not that history has become too specialized and narrow. No. The problem is that academic historians are worse writers, in terms of style and wit, than their predecessors. A good historian is also a good fiction author, a master at speculation, a cousin to philosophers. That's what Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams and Pierre Briant all have in common despite their diverse historical interests: their love for literature, for good prose, for poetically crafted phrases and thoughts. Unfortunately, that is precisely what this manifesto is lacking and why some academic history might be failing.

[Duncan McLaren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had some unique claims, but after seeing how little they truly understand climate change and the forces/discussions behind it, I no longer trust historians to stay impartial in the slightest. Given that historians are masters of narratives and narratives are the way humans understand the world (even though narratives almost never fully map onto anything) historians should never take a side in politics. This book revolted me and made me have an extreme distrust of historians. Almost all modern historians are ideologically possessed before they even join the field and only choose to study what they are interested in and ALREADY feel strongly about. Keep the historians in the library and let the economists advise the future

[Sander Philipse · Rating 2 out of 5]

With an overly simplistic view of and distinction between longue duree and what they call short-term history, Jo Guldi and David Armitage argue that long-term history is the main or perhaps only way to provide public historical engagement. Their thesis and argumentation are unconvincing, and mostly just boring.

[Lupo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pamphlettistico invito agli storici di riprendersi il ruolo di consiglieri della vita pubblica che economisti e altri esperti del breve-termine hanno soffiato loro negli ultimi decenni. E' dunque un libro per specialisti, comunque fruibile anche da chi non lo è ma si diletta con la Storia. Condivisibili le sprezzanti critiche verso gli economisti o, almeno, verso la gran parte di loro.

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

I, for one, am willing to sacrifice some of my fellow students to Silicon Valley if it means I can write my research paper on homosexual acceptance within the Dutch Left during the latter half of the 20th century, while safe in the knowledge that the History department will not be dissolved.

[Skut333 · Rating 4 out of 5]

книга непроста і розрахована на проофесіоналів, що намагаються бути в курсі світових змін в гуманітраних науках і зокрема в історії. Книга дуже дискусійна проте, вона чудова бо є дуже свіжою і сміливою з точки зору новизни авторської думки.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors call historians to return to public and academic relevancy, as arbiters of public perception and political advisement. This treatise explores the division between micro- and macro-history and gives a history of their respective historiographies.

[xx]

I enjoyed the historical coverage of, well, historicism. What bothered me, which is often the case with academia these days, is the direct attack on Liberalism, through the “consolidated left” lenses. With that out of the way, I think this is a nice critique, with a good recommendation at the end.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Human history is NOT confined to span of decades or centuries.

[Fachrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A convincing argument on the importance of longue durée history and the need for historians to engage with the public.

[Pere Roca]

Me l'hauria de tornar a llegir.