“With extensive source material and broad geographical range, Aronova gives us a tight and interwoven sense of trajectories of past big historical and big data ambitions and practices, relating these to shifting cultural and political contexts and observing the striking historical ironies these trajectories reveal. The book is significant in canvassing so much diverse material so efficiently and expertly, uncovering unexpected and disregarded historical connections while presenting the material engagingly and accessibly. It is a satisfying, impressive piece of scholarship that provides an explicit, extended, transnational historicization of big history."

Nasser Zakariya, author of A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings

"Where do today's dreams of writing history scientifically come from? Not from David Christian and Bill Gates, Anthropocene scholars, apostles of digital humanities, apologists for big data, amateur neuroscientists, or latterday cliometricians. Aronova provides a deeper genealogy of today's data-driven obsessions, rooted instead in twentieth-century Russian ambitions for a scientific Marxism. Using 'Russia-as-method' to examine Soviet visions of history as a materialist science, Aronova's sparklingly subversive narrative excavates foundational fights over how to write the history of science, how to practice the science of history, and how to tell the story of mankind. A work of wit, grace, and profundity."

James Delbourgo, James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Professor of History, Rutgers University

"A captivating tale of Clio becoming a scientist! Animated by a commanding multinational cast of characters, Scientific History offers the first broad-ranging analysis of why and how the methods, approaches, values, and frameworks advanced within the natural sciences—ranging from biogeography to mathematics to genetics—became part of historians’ armamentarium and profoundly influenced twentieth-century historical thought and practice. This engaging account ventures with enviable ease from the editorial offices of the Annales to the sessions of international history congresses, through the corridors of UNESCO to computer rooms at the ‘scientific information’ institutes in Philadelphia and Moscow. Aronova uncovers the forgotten and sometimes deliberately obscured but deep and thoroughly transnational roots of present-day historians’ fascination with ‘big data,’ quantification, and ‘big history.’ Meticulously researched and refreshingly free from Cold War–era polarizing biases, this book is a must read for anyone interested in history, science, and their intricate connections."

Nikolai Krementsov, author of Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction