The History Manifesto and Its Critics

     This week's reading of The History Manifesto read a lot like an overview of history as a discipline. One of the main points of the book is about how historians in the mid-1900s began writing long, overarching histories called "longue durée". This approach to historical writing, as Guldi and Armitage point out, are individuals that are looking back in the past to get a better understanding of what to expect in the future (26). 

    The "longue durée" approach was not used just by historians, but also political scientists, political activists, psychologists, biologists, etc. These people, who were not originally trained to look back into history like a historian would, had their own agendas for doing so. Some people might be looking back into the past to try and influence political policies of the present, others may be trying to find connections to make the argument of climate change strong. the main factor was that "longue durée" was as much a historical approach as it was an approach other disciplines could use. This development is understandable when we look at the longue durée as a product of the Annales school, and the interconnection of the humanities and the social sciences. 

    The book is not all about the longue durée, as I mentioned, it reads more like the evolution of the history field. As such, the later chapters deal with the question of "big data" and the use of the internet and web tools. Guldi and Armitage are big supporters of historians swapping from tradition methods of doing research, to using the technology available to them to widen their scope. Connecting back to the idea of the longue durée, the authors see these new tools as a way to analyze more data than ever before and encourage historians to use this data to ask even bigger questions than before. The authors point out projects like David Geggus' ‘Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records’, as well as Thomas C. Peterson and Russell S. Vose, ‘An Overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network Temperature Database’, as two projects that have embraced the new tools given to historians and utilized the abundance of data available to them to ask and try and answer bigger questions. 

    Not everyone has agreed with everything Guldi and Armitage have said in The History Manifesto, however. The AHR Exchange has a few critiques of the book, including the Manifesto's attack against "short-termism". Guldi and Armitage attack historians for tackling "short-term" problems, which is why they struggle finding answers for things like persistent economic inequality. Yet Cohen and Mandler's essay in the AHR Exchange refute that the claims that "short-termism" was a major phenomenon in the later decades of the 20th century are false. They argue that the data Guldi and Armitage brought about to try and support their claim does not hold its weight under a more scrutinous  examination. Another critique of the Manifesto is that no matter how far ahead technology is at this moment, digital tools should be used as a complementary tool to tradition historical methods of research, and not completely phase out the more traditional approaches.

    Guldi and Armitage's response to these critiques are written in a blog titled, "The History Manifesto: Vision and Revision". When replying to claims that "short-termism", their response was a bit confusing to me. When directly speaking about short-termism, the authors said the Manifesto was written in part to help "Entrepreneurs wanting to break out of short-termism", which does not directly refute the claims brought about by Cohen and Mandle. In fact, earlier on in the blog post, Guldi and Armitage talk about how the longue durée type of history is past down, at least for military historians, because of the baby-boomer historians who experienced the Vietnam War and were searching for answers. The second critique of them pushing too much for digital tools they would agree with. From their blog, it does not seem like they outright believe all digital tools can take over traditional methods, however, the amount of digital tools are expanding rapidly. I think the hard stance that Guldi and Armitage might have had in the Manifesto may have came from the fact the book is open-sourced and free to the public. They may have felt some type of hype around digital history because of their success on being able to publish the Manifesto openly, which may have played into the overselling of digital tools. That one is just a theory though.