In 1850 Thomas Carlyle recognized that he lived in an "age of ... statues" and monuments and that these were beginning to "dominate the marketplaces of towns". He believed that most of these, such as those erected in honor of boom-and-bust railway magnates ought to be toppled and "reduc[ed] ... to the state of broken metal again" and turned into "warming-pans" and "brass candle-sticks". He argued that rather than hold up such men as societal models, one ought to "have sunk a coalshaft rather than raised a column ... there to bury [them] and [their] memory". In the same book, Latter-Day Pamphlets, in which Carlyle penned those lines, his own thinking took an intolerant turn and has been characterized as "abusive" and "aggressive" (Tambling) and filled with "personal malevolence" (Masson). Owing in part to this and to the professionalization of the discipline of history, Carlyle’s historical writings, it could be said, have long ago been cast into a “coalshaft” of their own. They have not appeared on history department readings lists and history graduate students do not write on Carlyle’s historical writings, including his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, The French Revolution, Past and Present, Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great, etc. Thus, it is a strange matter indeed that at this precise political moment (when monuments to injustice are being dismantled and statues toppled) that the historical writings of Thomas Carlyle are experiencing a recrudescence. And this is not merely a matter of several scholars huddling together in a far-flung conference to keep warm Carlyle’s intellectual thought by kindling papers on various subjects, nor is it about some kind of heritage industry that would see the former (short-lived) Lord Rector of Edinburgh University ensconced in the Scottish pantheon with Burns, Scott and Stevenson, although Carlyle might have shared more in temperament with Knox. It is on the one hand about scholarly editions such as the newly published handsome three volume critical edition of The French Revolution by Oxford University Press or the ongoing University of California Press Strouse multi-volume critical edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle. One of these volumes, Historical Essays, comes in at just under 1,150 pages. The magisterial Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle by Duke University Press currently stands at 50 volumes. And in recent years scholars have met at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Villanova and elsewhere to discuss his contribution to history and historical thinking. There are recent biographies and books on his work, including most recently a set of scholarly essays, Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence. This panel brings together not only Carlyle scholars, but also those who are producing the aforementioned editions, and will consider up-to-date historiographical assessments of Thomas Carlyle’s historical thought and writings and assess why they are making a comeback at this particular moment in time.