Short description:

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past: not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

Long description:

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology).

What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume?s contributors describe how they relate phenomena in the past and their observations of the present, revealing intellectual resonances and opportunities for dialogue across subjects that are too often walled off from one another. By engaging scholars in a conversation about a first principle of their work, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary consideration of a timeless question, with implications for knowledge about both past and present.

Engaging with the Past and Present is full of insights and ideas for anyone seeking to understand the past or employ it as evidence for understanding present realities.

Table of Contents:

1. Engaging with the Past and the Present: an Introduction  Part 1: Past, Present and History  2. Reflections on March Bloch's Maxim  3. When Does the Present Become the Past?  4. Does the Past Still Matter? In the Shadow of the Growing Footprint of the Future  5. The Big History of Past, Present and Future  Part 2: Past, Present and Human Culture  6. Historical Faith and Faithful History  7. Confucian Culture and the Imminence of the Past  8. Past, Present, and Heritage 9. The Continuum between the Past and Present: an Art Historian's View  10. Digging into the Human Past: Archeology, Time, and the Object  11. Archives: Preserving the Documentary Past  Part 3: Past, Present and Natural History  12. Earth Time: Lessons from the "Boring Billions"  13. The Past and Present in Environmental Science  14. The Past and Present of the Cosmos  15. Disengaging with the Past: Extinction and Resets of the Biosphere  16. The Human Deep Past (Paleoanthropology)