About the Book
The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.
This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography
Table of Contents:
Introduction, Historical Understanding Today, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Part I: The Historical Present
Historicities
1. The Texture of the Present, François Hartog (EHESS, France)
2. Framing the Polychronic Present, Victoria Fareld (Stockholm University, Sweden)
3. Caught between Past and Future: On the Uses of Temporality for Political Exclusion, Moira Pérez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
4. In Sync/Out of Sync, Helge Jordheim, (University of Oslo, Norway)
5. Favoring an Offensive Presentism, Lars Deile, (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Histories
6. Infinite History, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, (Australian National University, Australia)
7. History of the Present: Or, Two Approaches to Causality and Contingency, Stefanos Geroulanos, (New York University, USA)
8. Theses on Theory and History WILD ON COLLECTIVE, Ethan Kleinberg, (Wesleyan University, USA) Joan Wallach Scott, (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA), Gary Wilder, (CUNY, USA)
9. Can Historians Be Replaced by Algorithms?, Jo Guldi, (Southern Methodist University, USA)
Part II. History and the Future
Historicities
10. Planetary Futures, Planetary History, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, (Bielefeld University, Germany)
11. Future-Oriented History, Marek Tamm, (Tallinn University, Estonia)
12. What Future for the Future? Utopian Lessons from a Global Pandemic, Patrícia Vieira (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Histories
13. The Future as a Domain of Historical Inquiry, David Staley, (Ohio State University, USA)
14. Periodization of the Future, Cornelius Holtorf, (Linnaeus University, Sweden)
15. History and Technology Futures: Where History and Technology Assessment Come Together, Silke Zimmer-Merkle, (Institute for Technology Karlsruhe, Germany)
16. Tomorrow is the Question: Modernity and the Need for Strong Narratives about the Future – and the Past, Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Part III: Relations to the Past
Historicities
17. Probing the Limits of a Metaphor: On the Stratigraphic Model in History and Geology, Chris Lorenz, (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
18. Against the Historicist Tradition of Historical Understanding, Jörg van Norden, (Bielefeld University, Germany)
19. Historical Understanding and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict, Berber Bevernage, (Ghent University, Belgium), Kate E. Temoney (Montclair State University, USA)
20. The Cross-Cultural Appeal of the ‘Mirror’ Metaphor—History as Practical Past, Q. Edward Wang (Rowan University, USA)
Histories
21. Mouse-Eaten Records, Erica Fudge (University of Strathclyde, UK)
22. Lines of Sight: The Historical Certitude of Digital Reenactment, Vanessa Agnew, (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
23. The DNA Archive, Jermoe de Groot (University of Manchester, UK)
24. Doing History and the Pre-Conceptual, Suman Gupta (The Open University, UK)
Conclusion, Historical Understanding Today: Incidental Remarks, Lars Deilie (Bielefeld University, Germany)
About the Author :
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Research Fellow at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Zoltán’s recent work explores the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and modern historical thinking. He has published in journals ranging from History and Theory to The Anthropocene Review, and he is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words (2020).
Lars Deile is Professor of Didactics and Theory of History at Bielefeld University. His work circles around intellectual and educational history, history didactics, history politics and theory of history. Currently he tries to bring such questions together in a theory of historical learning which is based on a phenomenological approach.
Review :
With its rich collection of diverse and distinctive voices - each attuned to some aspect or other of contemporary global and planetary problems that tend to undo settled ideas about the historian's endeavor - this important volume bears critical witness to the challenges that presently confront the very conception of 'historical understanding.' The book does not propose any grand solutions but no discussion of where history is at today can afford to proceed in ignorance of this book. A key collection for our times.
If you think history is an outmoded discipline, read this book. Presentism, trauma, and environmental crises may have buried many twentieth-century approaches to the past, but they have also given birth to a plurality of new practices. This volume displays the richness of history now.
The notion of historical understanding provides a perfect framework for uniting diverse contemporary perspectives and capturing the bewildering and exciting historical moment we find ourselves in. This volume embraces and amplifies this brilliantly, mainly by bringing together an impressive array of top-notch historians and their theorists, who probe many crucial popular as well as professional problems and possibilities of our historically-minded world. Sometimes radical, sometimes hopeful, always interesting, this volume is a superb introduction to how we think about the past and future today.
