Historians Attack the Data and the Ethics of Colleagues' Manifesto

Related Link Historians May Never Rule the World, but Their Models will Rule the Data-Driven Future By Jo Guldi and David Armitage

In The History Manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage challenged their fellow historians with a "call to arms." For years, the book argued, historians had narrowed their research and retreated from the public sphere. But problems like climate change and inequality demand big-picture thinking. Historians should supply it.

Cambridge University Press published The History Manifesto free online as an open-access experiment. The slim text has provoked an international reaction since its release in October, with dozens of commentaries in newspapers, blogs, journals, and on the BBC, where Mr. Armitage debated the book with a member of Parliament. Much of the reaction has been positive. Writers have praised the manifesto for highlighting the diminution of historians’ influence on policy and for sounding a "clarion call" to rethink the study of the past.

But now some historians are turning their guns on the manifesto’s authors. In prominent American and French journals, these critics attack the narrative presented by Ms. Guldi, an assistant professor of history at Brown University, and Mr. Armitage, who is on leave as chair of Harvard University’s history department. Some critics, citing changes made in the book’s online edition, also question the authors’ ethics.

The debate seems likely to become a case study taught to future graduate students — a sharp exchange that concerns both how historians do their work and what protocols should prevail for critiquing and revising scholarship online.

"All parties have touched a nerve that gets at historians’ anxiety about their vocation," says Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Harvard, who praised the manifesto’s "exciting argument" in The Nation. "Why are we doing this? For whom? … This debate, whoever you think wins, has raised the profile of those questions." ...