As a trained historian, although largely working in other areas these days, this caught my eye:
Jerome de Groot, head of the graduate school and director of research training, University of Manchester, is reading Jorma Kalela’s Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past (Palgrave, 2012). “This interesting book asks a ‘reasonable’ question of historians: namely, why they are needed. Kalela discusses the way that historians see themselves and then argues that this is relatively unrelated to reality; to make a political difference, they will need to consider different audiences and situate their practice much more precisely outside the academy.”