Abstract Summary
How have scholars used the methods of science to write stories about the human past and predict humanity’s future? How have conceptions of scientific evidence and theory shaped the writing of history across disciplinary and temporal boundaries? This panel considers three such cases from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, using the history of science as a lens for viewing past moments in what has been called universal or “big” history, and exploring the interplay among science, history, and historiography: in the writings of mathematician and philosopher Condorcet, who applied the predictive capacity of hypotheses in natural history to the study of human history and its futures; in the work of Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, whose “geno-geography” crossed not only physical and political boundaries, but disciplinary ones as well; and in the new popular histories of Africa and the world written in the 1960s, which capitalized on the most recent developments in palaeoanthropology, and in so doing, obscured a very large joint historiographical and scientific tradition that had previously placed the origins of humanity somewhere else. How have scientific developments inspired new historical narratives or new historiographic practices? How have historians drawn on scientific sources when expanding their narratives beyond their present and into the far horizons of the human future? What happens to these histories when the science underpinning them is called into question, or replaced by an alternate theory?
Self-Designated Keywords :
historiography, universal history, futurology, deep history
