Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The History Manifesto: A Critique

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/120.2.530

1937-5239

Déborah Cohen, Peter Mandler,

Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy

NATURE of manifestos to be one-eyed and just a little authoritarian: they are rallying cries to lead soldiers into battle.For that reason, history is a subject almost uniquely ill-suited to manifestos.Historians are not soldiers; they don't fight on a single front, and-at a time when, more than ever before, historians have been operating in an impressive diversity of modes and theaters-they certainly don't need to be led in one direction.In our critique, we do not dispute the validity of Guldi and Armitage's favored modes of historiography. 1 We have both worked in a variety of time scales (long, short, and medium).We view quantitative and digital methods as useful tools in the historian's repertoire and use them in our own practice (as well as in this critique). 2 We are entirely in favor of the social engagement of scholars outside the academy.What we object to are the arguments (and where they present any, the evidence) that Guldi and Armitage offer in their attempt to persuade everyone else to follow their own chosen path.When the underpinnings of their manifesto are examined, the supporting evidence either is nonexistent or mandates just the opposite conclusion.This is true for each of their major propositions: the retreat of the longue dure ´e they posit, the correlation they draw between the length of time a study covers and its significance, the alleged salience of long-term arguments to policymaking, the presumptions about historians' superiority as arbiters of big data, and the crisis of the humanities that requires the cure they are proposing. 3 The History Manifesto offers not, as its authors imagine, a bold new frontier, but rather a narrowing of the public role that historians already occupy and a diminution of the audiences they currently enjoy.