News for the Delphic Oracle: History Can Be Measured

Reviews the book, Genius, Creativity, and Leadership: Historiometric Inquiries by Dean Keith Simonton (1984). This small book is very much a restatement in perspective of Simonton's extensive research over the ten-year period from his 1974 doctoral dissertation, to his 1984 essay, "Leader Age and National Condition." It is an admirable condensation as well, not only in compressing his voluminous publications (thirty-three in all), but also in distilling his findings on creativity, a field to which he has given much impetus with his variant on the method of intergenerational analysis. Historiometry and psychohistory as subdisciplines within the fields of history and psychology date back to the turn of the century, but they have acquired considerably greater energy with advances in measurement theory and practice while retaining the historically broad and psychologically deep scope of the questions they have opened up. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)