«The notion of historical understanding provides a perfect framework for uniting diverse contemporary perspectives and capturing the bewildering and exciting historical moment we find ourselves in. This volume embraces and amplifies this brilliantly, mainly by bringing together an impressive array of top-notch historians and their theorists, who probe many crucial popular as well as professional problems and possibilities of our historically-minded world. Sometimes radical, sometimes hopeful, always interesting, this volume is a superb introduction to how we think about the past and future today.»

David Gary Shaw, Professor of History, Wesleyan University, USA

«With its rich collection of diverse and distinctive voices - each attuned to some aspect or other of contemporary global and planetary problems that tend to undo settled ideas about the historian's endeavor - this important volume bears critical witness to the challenges that presently confront the very conception of 'historical understanding.' The book does not propose any grand solutions but no discussion of where history is at today can afford to proceed in ignorance of this book. A key collection for our times.»

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Lang

«If you think history is an outmoded discipline, read this book. Presentism, trauma, and environmental crises may have buried many twentieth-century approaches to the past, but they have also given birth to a plurality of new practices. This volume displays the richness of history now.»

Julia Adeney Thomas, Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, USA