SUMMARY:

This is the Russian translation of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. The book’s main focus is a critique of the shortage of long-term thinking that, according to the authors, characterizes the social imagination of our time and the dominant mode of history writing. They propose a return to longue durée history as a tool of social analysis directed toward the future. In a crisis of short-termism, Guldi and Armitage claim, our world needs somewhere to turn for information about the relationship between past and future. History – as a discipline and a subject matter – is an ideal candidate for the job, just the arbiter we need at this critical time.
In the Conclusion, the authors summarize their argument as developed in the four chapters of the text. They assert that history’s relationship with the “public future” lies in developing a longue-durée contextual background against which archival information, events, and sources can be interpreted.