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https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/09/17/review-jo-guldi-and-david-armitage-history-manifesto
The History Manifesto
September 17, 2014
By Scott McLemee
When young sociologists would consult with C. Wright Mills, it’s said,
he would end his recommendations with what was clearly a personal motto:
“Take it big!” It was the concentrated expression of an ethos: Tackle
major issues. Ask wide-ranging questions. Use the tools of your
profession, but be careful not to let them dig a mental rut you can’t
escape.
Jo Guldi and David Armitage give much the same advice to their
colleagues, and especially their colleagues-to-be, in The History
Manifesto, a new book from Cambridge University Press. (Guldi is an
assistant professor of history at Brown University, while Armitage is
chair of the history department at Harvard.) Only by “taking it big” can
their field regain the power and influence it once had in public life –
and lost, somewhere along the line, to economics, with its faith in
quantification and the seeming rigor of its concepts.
But issues such as climate change and growing economic inequality must
be understood in terms of decades and centuries. The role of economists
as counselors to the powerful has certainly been up for question over
the past six years. Meanwhile, the world’s financial system continues to
be shaped by computerized transactions conducted at speeds only a little
slower than the decay of subatomic particles. And so, with their
manifesto, the authors raise the call: Now is the time for all good
historians to come to the aid of their planet.
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