Paul M. Dover is Professor of History at Kennesaw State University. He has published widely in early modern political and cultural history and in the history of information. His most recent book is The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2021).

1. Engaging with the Past and the Present: an Introduction Part 1: Past, Present and History 2. Reflections on March Bloch's Maxim 3. When Does the Present Become the Past? 4. Does the Past Still Matter? In the Shadow of the Growing Footprint of the Future 5. The Big History of Past, Present and Future Part 2: Past, Present and Human Culture 6. Historical Faith and Faithful History 7. Confucian Culture and the Imminence of the Past 8. Past, Present, and Heritage 9. The Continuum between the Past and Present: an Art Historian's View 10. Digging into the Human Past: Archeology, Time, and the Object 11. Archives: Preserving the Documentary Past Part 3: Past, Present and Natural History 12. Earth Time: Lessons from the "Boring Billions" 13. The Past and Present in Environmental Science 14. The Past and Present of the Cosmos 15. Disengaging with the Past: Extinction and Resets of the Biosphere 16. The Human Deep Past (Paleoanthropology)

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past: not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.