History and Human Flourishing

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and to what degree the humanities can increase human happiness.

This volume examines the relationship between history and human flourishing and, more broadly, investigates the ways in which the arts and humanities are related to human well-being. The essays here represent the efforts of a varied and distinguished group of professional historians to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the value of history for life? Each author asks in what ways historians, their work, and the objects of their inquiry might contribute to human well-being and how they might be encouraged to do so.

History, in this volume, refers not just to the past writ large, but also to the discipline and practice of historical inquiry, along with the production and consumption of works of historical representation. Thinking of history in these ways, the contributors address a wide variety of subjects in connection to issues of well-being, considering history across time and place as a vocation, a source of the sublime, a site of play, and a repository of meaning with surprising analogues to religious experience.

Overall, History and Human Flourishing uses personal experience, insight into the professional and scholarly world of historians, and a variety of historical periods and approaches to highlight the value of studying history in discussions of human flourishing. The essays in this volume identify history and the historical craft as tremendous potential resources for human well-being and of vital importance for our times.

Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, he is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); Happiness: A History (2006), and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (2013). McMahon is currently co-editor at the journal Modern Intellectual History and is at work on a history of ideas of equality.

Series Editor's Foreword by James O. Pawelski
Introduction by Darrin M. McMahon

Chapter 1: "History, the Humanities, and the Human"
D. Graham Burnett

Chapter 2: "The Power of a Well-Told History"
Maya Jasanoff

Chapter 3: "In Defense of Presentism"
David Armitage

Chapter 4: "Wellbeing and a Usable Past: The Role of Historical Diagnosis"
Peter N. Stearns

Chapter 5: "Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying: The Strange Case of Consistent Luckiness in Aristotle"
Peter T. Struck

Chapter 6: "The Historical Sublime"
Dan Edelstein

Chapter 7: "Flourishing with Herodotus"
Suzanne Marchand

Chapter 8: "De Beata Historia: On History and Human Flourishing"
Darrin M. McMahon

Chapter 9: ""Beauty Is Universal"": Virtue, Aesthetics, Emotion, and Race in James Logan's Atlantic Moral Sense Philosophy"
Nicole Eustace

Chapter 10: "Toward a History of Black Happiness: Or, What Can African American History Tell Us about the Cultivation of Well-Being?"
Mia Bay