Are historians asking the right questions?
Mazlish: The first thing that must be said is that there is some wonderfully creative work going on in history. But we still have a long way to go, and in part this is a function of the way the field has been institutionalized. While our world has changed, historians havent absorbed that fact. The nation-state has been the main orientation of historians; the training of historians and the resources committed to history still reflect this. So many of the things that concern us todaythe environment, currencies, jobs, etc.are global, and we dont have the analytic categories to understand these. How do you make the jump, especially when the profession still rewards the monograph based on archival material? To be sure, the monograph is the bedrock of historical inquiry, but we need to redefine what we mean by an archive nowadays. What makes history so fascinating to me is that it is telling us who we are, what we are, what we have been, and where we are going. I may overstate my case here,
