James O. Barbre (Indiana): History Texts: A Potential Vehicle for Social Justice. From TLS, so-called big history has been inhospitable to the questions of meaning and intention so central to intellectual history – isn’t it time for a reconciliation? A review of Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past by Jorma Kalela. From Social Evolution Forum, Peter Turchin on psychohistory and cliodynamics. An interview with James M. Banner, Jr., author of Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History. Scott McLemee reviews Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back. From The Fortnightly Review, Ricardo Duchesne on the Faustian impulse and European exploration. A review of Presenting History: Past and Present by Peter J. Beck. Human cycles, history as science: Advocates of “cliodynamics” say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past — but historians are not so sure (and more). From Dissent, Timothy Shenk on Eric Hobsbawm and the limits of Marxism (and more and more and more and more).
