Book, Manifesto for History[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. The quintessential form of knowledge about the past, history faces an unavoidable question: what will be its future? If the idea of ​​crisis has already been mobilized countless times to deal with the impasses faced by the discipline, today the paths of reflection cross the terrain of what is inherent to it, that is, temporality. Marked by the “cult of urgency” and the “tyranny of the instant”, according to recurring formulas, contemporary experience manifests itself through a striking characteristic, presentist acceleration, that is, that which, instead of hastening the pace of the present direction to the future, seeks to anticipate the future for the now, causing an already everyday feeling of vertigo. The time that opens today for the writing of history is the hurried time of short-termism. And it is for this time that Jo Guldi and David Armitage write their Manifesto for history, which still bears the marks of a time when manifestos enunciated the existence of a spectrum to, in the end, launch a conciliatory appeal for unity. The proposal is still provocative, as it places within the scope of the longue durée – adapted to the technical possibilities of dealing with big data – the capacity of history to intervene in the present, offering, if not lessons, open perspectives for the future through a long-term look at the past. A kind of historia magistra vitae for digital times, therefore, a safe resource to the past of the discipline when we are no longer even sure that there will be a future for it. Fernando Nicolazzi