This small book addresses several large issues—the character of historical scholarship in recent decades, the relationship between history and other academic disciplines, the opportunity that “big data” offers historians, and the responsibility of historians to engage and seek to persuade the widest possible audience about pressing contemporary issues. The work combines wide-gauge, diagnostic analysis with highly focused, impassioned exhortation.
The authors’ basic argument is that beginning in the 1970s, for various professional and political reasons, most academic historians started researching archive-intensive, small-scale projects within short-term time frames. This microhistorical turn brought both gains and losses. The losses included ceding large-scale historical claims in the public sphere to colleagues in other disciplines (especially economists but also political scientists and evolutionary biologists) less equipped to address the complex, multicausal changes that characterize human life. Consequently, with respect to current issues of global import, including climate change, international governance, and socio-economic inequality, public...