Historical Understanding

The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them.
Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals.

This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate “historically” in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Research Fellow at Bielefeld University. He has been assistant professor at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Zoltán’s recent work explores the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to the human condition and modern historical thinking. He has published in journals ranging from History and Theory to The Anthropocene Review, and he is the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Words (2020).

Lars Deile is Professor of Didactics and Theory of History at Bielefeld University. His work circles around intellectual and educational history, history didactics, history politics and theory of history. Currently he tries to bring such questions together in a theory of historical learning which is based on a phenomenological approach.