Free Download of The History Manifesto: Historians New Call for Big-Picture Thinking

history manifesto

Briefly not­ed…

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press has just pub­lished a new book called The His­to­ry Man­i­festo by Jo Gul­di (Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Brown Uni­ver­si­ty) and David Armitage (Chair of Har­vard’s His­to­ry Depart­ment). In a nut­shell, the book argues that his­to­ri­ans have lost their pub­lic rel­e­vance by writ­ing his­to­ries of the “short term” — essen­tial­ly “micro-scale” his­to­ries — when they could be writ­ing big­ger, deep­er his­to­ries, cov­er­ing longer peri­ods of time, that help read­ers put our world into per­spec­tive. What Gul­di and Armitage are call­ing for is a return to long, mean­ing­ful nar­ra­tives and big-pic­ture think­ing — the kind of think­ing that could per­haps pull the his­tor­i­cal pro­fes­sion out of cri­sis. As some­one who got his PhD in His­to­ry dur­ing the “micro-scale” era, all I can say is — amen to that.

Print edi­tions of The His­to­ry Man­i­festo will come out in Novem­ber. But you can already read the entire work online in both html and PDF for­mats. The book has been released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

H/T @NathanVM

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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