"But This Is Not Tragic Determinism"

"Braudel's writing also sought to confront the inability of even the greatest historians to predict what would happen next. In this light, his pessimism about human time and human stories can be hard to face. When I teach the Annales school to undergraduates, I read them the most famous line from The Mediterranean: 'When I think of the individual I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand.' Students always want to argue with this–and I'd be concerned if they didn't. This reminds me how difficult it is to accept Braudel's profound disbelief in human agency. His philosophy of history is one we would rather leave behind in the past, even as the evidence for it continues to pile up." 

At the London Review of Books, Erin Maglaque looks at a new translation of Ferdinand Braudel's Out of Italy.

"Making the Great Man Theory of History Great Again"

"As a professional historian, this sort of analysis is entirely contrary to the way I was trained, which was to see social change developing across broad swaths of society, not emanating from particular individuals. Moreover, I was partly trained in France, under the aegis of the so-called Annales school, whose vision of history could not be more different from the heroic one. Fernand Braudel, one of the leaders of the school, taught his followers to pay attention to the deep, slow, geological, and climactic forces that, in determining the shape of the continents and patterns of global warming and cooling, ultimately shape human societies as well. After that, Braudel directed us to study centuries-long patterns of economic and social change. He compared all these subjects to the deep currents moving through oceans. Mere 'event history,' by contrast, including decisions taken by powerful individuals, he likened to the insignificant foam tossed up on the ocean's surface. Much of the history influenced by Braudel barely even mentioned particular individuals, let alone attributed a decisive influence to them. In short, my instinct was long to treat the 'heroic mode' as simplistic and misleading."

David A. Bell in Foreign Policy says that Donald Trump's "unpredictable rise is forcing historians and social scientists to rethink their most basic assumptions about how the world works."

"The Most Basic Apprehension of Our Condition Demands a Scaling-Up of Our Enquiries"

"The public future of the past is now firmly in historians' hands. History as a discipline is poised to recover its ancient mission as the guide to life but in a new guise as a critical human science, capable of judging data, incorporating it into complex narratives, and presenting its conclusions in forms accessible to the widest possible range of publics as well to those who make the policies that shape all of our lives. Historians now have more evidence–more data–in more forms available to them than ever before. Using digital materials and the tools to make sense of this data, historians can perform analytical feats that would have required a lifetime of immersion a generation ago."


In Aeon, David Armitage and Jo Guldi champion the longue durée over the Short Past.


Annalee Newitz in io9 responds.