Editor’s Summary (Nature, 3 July 2008)
The future of history: Why it needs to become a science
“For much of human history we have plenty of facts. The job of historians is to select and arrange those facts to support a range of subjective interpretations. Peter Turchin thinks that at that rate, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Instead, he says, we need unifying theories. We should use the data to construct general explanations, and test them on all the data, not a subset chosen to make a point. To learn from history, first we must make it science.”
Can History Become a Real Science? (in Russian: Может ли история стать настоящей наукой?) A report on my Nature essay by Alexander Markov at the popular science site The Elements. To read, click here
Clio with a Calculator (In Russian: Клио с калькулятором). A news article by Yury Drize in Poisk, the popular science magazine of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
