"We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots, one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world. Human beings have, however, become probably the most powerful species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller understanding of the past than either can produce on its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a counter-insurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? ..."

"calls for the reconstruction of economic history, one in which history and the social sciences are brought to bear on economics, and not the other way around."

Collection of reprints of Tilly's methodological papers. Not really a weblog.

full text free on-line

Eric Rauchway describes, with excerpts, an essay by on this subject by Maurice Bloch, with illustrations from WWI. Sounds astonishingly like Dan Sperber, only with an unfortunate collectivist overlay.

On the one hand, on specific points of ancient history Lefkowitz seemed (& seems) to me to be right. But _her_ work was also politicized...

Not read yet, comes recommended by the orgtheory crowd

The search for the historical truth likened to the search for the car keys.

Pining for "kind of intellectual history recognizes that any contemporary idea has junk DNA in its genes, has unacknowledged ancestral branches full of bastards and incest, that its evolutionary line is a bush and not a spine"

Brad reflects on the start of his economic history course; and also on the place of economics and scientific progress in modern history, and the reciprocity between history and social science

Concealed causal theories in apparently plain historical narratives. (Cf. Popper, _Poverty of Historicism_.)

Think of this as teaching by negative example; a collection of anti-patterns for historical thought.