Is the longue durée making a comeback in history? Not that I've noticed, but you never know!

History is a guide to understanding life:

History combines the best of science with the humanities, offering us reams of data while also placing it in an interpretive framework. History, they suggest, helps us understand that there are many possible outcomes any any given situation, but that certain courses of action are more likely to succeed. Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations — perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization. After all, economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take, if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter.