History at one time drew unproblematically on records produced by human societies about themselves and their doings. Advances in biology and the earth sciences introduced new narrative resources that repositioned the human story in relation to the evolution of all else on the planet, thereby decentering earlier conceptions of time, life, and human agency. This essay reflects on what it means for our understanding of the human that the history of our species has become so intimately entangled with the material processes that make up the biosphere, while concurrently the temporal horizon of our imagination has been stretched forward and back, underscoring the brevity of human existence in relation to earthly time. I suggest that, despite significant changes in the resources with which we can rethink the human condition, drawing upon the sciences, history’s fundamental purposes have not been rendered irrelevant. These center, as before, on the normative project of connecting past and future in ways that make sense of human experience and give meaning to it. In particular, the question of how humans should imagine the stewardship of the Earth in the Anthropocene remains an ethical project for history and not primarily the domain of the natural sciences.

一次历史就毫无疑问地借鉴了人类社会关于自己及其所作所为的记录。生物学和地球科学的进步引入了新的叙事资源，这些叙事资源使人类故事相对于地球上所有其他事物的进化而重新定位，从而使时间，生命和人类代理的早期观念失去了中心性。本文反映了对我们人类的理解意味着我们物种的历史已经与构成生物圈的物质过程如此紧密地纠缠在一起，同时我们的想象力的时空视野被前后拉长，强调了与世俗时间有关的人类生存的简短性。我建议，尽管在资源上发生了巨大变化，我们可以利用科学重新思考人类的状况，历史的基本目的并没有变得无关紧要。像以前一样，这些中心都集中在规范性项目上，该项目以有意义的人类经验并赋予其意义的方式将过去和未来联系在一起。特别是，人类应该如何想象人类在人类世间的管理问题仍然是历史的伦理学课题，而不是自然科学的范畴。