Charles Darwin has been moldering in his grave now for a full century. But it is not death with which we associate his name; it is life, in all its abundance and variety. In particular, the argument he made for the natural origin of life, including humans, has been one of the most influential ideas in the world over that century’s span. It was accepted a long while back by almost everyone within the reach of modern science, despite the persistent opposition of a raggle-taggle band of creationists. But for all that general acceptance, Darwin’s ideas have not yet become working principles among several large groups of scholars. Take history, for example: reading the journals and dissertations in this field reveals the profound, continuing influence of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, but still there is no Darwin in our history, at least not as a tradition of historical theory. Evolution and history remain, after a hundred years, separate realms of discourse. There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian’s enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last. It will require us to step back now and then from parliamentary debates, social mobility data, and the biographies of illustrious figures in order to examine more elemental questions that concern the long-running human dialogue with the earth. The contemporary disjunction between the study of history and of nature has a fairly obvious explanation. In the eighteenth-century world of the English parson-naturalist, there was no such split; antiquities and natural curiosities lay jumbled together in the same country cupboard. As we moved away from that small rural community, the old broad-gauged, integrative “natural history” began to fragment into specializations. History increasingly became an archival pursuit, carried on by urban scholars; there was less and less dirt on it. Recently, however, that drift toward an unnatural history has run up against a few hard facts: dwindling energy supplies, population pressures on available food, the limits and costs of technology.