ABSTRACT
Manifestos by historians? Come on Jenkins, Morgan and Munslow, you’ve got to be kidding! It’s one thing for you, Sue, to produce a major critical feminist reader, for you, Keith, to write a book called Rethinking History, and for you, Alun, to found a journal with that same title, but asking a bunch of historians, we who march through the world looking backwards, to write manifestos about the future? I once subtitled an essay on postmodern history films ‘the Future of the Past’, a phrase which I have seen used by several other historians now in various contexts, not, I think, as plagiarism, but perhaps as an idea whose time has come, a reflection of a moment (as possible is this collection) when (a few or ever more?) historians have turned from the past to the future, concerned with what will happen to their professional calling in the decades and centuries to come, fearful that in this age of instant communication and gratification, when an era as recent as the sixties can seem to our students as remote as the Wars of the Roses was to us in our college days, that history is going the way of the dodo.
