History and Human Flourishing (The Humanities 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. Cover Series History and Human Flourishing Copyright Dedication Contents Series Editor’s Foreword List of Contributors Introduction 1. History, the Humanities, and the Human 2. In Defense of Presentism 3. The Power of a Well-​Told History 4. Well-​Being and a Usable Past: The Role of Historical Diagnosis 5. Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying: The Strange Case of Consistent Luckiness in Aristotle 6. The Historical Sublime 7. Flourishing with Herodotus 8. On the Consolations of History 9. “Beauty Is Universal”: Virtue, Aesthetics, Emotion, and Race in James Logan’s Atlantic Moral Sense Philosophy 10. Toward a History of Black Happiness: Or, What Can African American History Tell Us about the Cultivation of Well-​Being? Index "What is the value of history for life? And how, if at all, might historians and their work contribute to human flourishing and well-being? Those are the straightforward, if capacious, questions that the distinguished contributors to this volume were asked to consider. The essays gathered here represent their responses. Each essay considers the value of history for life and its connections to human flourishing from a different standpoint and perspective. The answers are often deeply personal, but collectively they concur in affirming history and the historical craft as tremendous resources for human well-being and of vital importance for our times"-- Provided by publisher This edited volume is devoted to an examination of 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 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? In response to that question, 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