Ebook: The History Manifesto

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 is a very important and refreshing book. For too long, we have seen increasing specialization within historical research and between the disciplines of social sciences. Armitage and Guldi rightly plead for a return of the 'longue durée'. They call for more global, long-run and transdisciplinary approaches to big questions, including climate change, inequality and the future of capitalism. Their book will be an important milestone in this direction. A must-read." —Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics

"This well-written, smart, deeply and broadly learned book is a bracing challenge to contemporary historiography. Critical of the loss of a sense of la longue durée and series, replaced by histories of the 'short term' and micro-scale since the 1970s, the authors argue that history has lost much of its public significance and usefulness. David Armitage and Jo Guldi have produced a rich history of the discipline as the foundation of a compelling plea for bringing forth more bigger and better histories into our civic life." —Thomas Bender, New York University

"Guldi and Armitage make a compelling argument for the relevance of history, and for its potential as an antidote to the twin afflictions of short-term thinking and future prognostication based on poor or partial evidence. In a concise and clear book, they make renewed claims for the capacity of the past and its data, properly studied, to inform public policy and democratic debate on a wide range of issues from economic malfunction to climate change. They also throw out a challenge to academic historians to pull on, and perhaps break, some disciplinary shackles that have mentally fettered the profession for the better part of a century." —Daniel Woolf, Queen's University, Ontario

Jo Guldi is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (2012).

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), Milton and Republicanism (co-edited, 1995), Bolingbroke: Political Writings (edited, 1997), British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800 (co-edited, 2006), and Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (co-edited, 2009), all from Cambridge University Press.