Susan Buck-Morss, (1995) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

History:
Benjamin's history writing aimed at destroying the 'mythic immediacy of the present' in order to free the political will for change (Buck-Morss, 1995: xi). The present is therefore not to be taken as the culmination of a cultural continuum but to explode this continuum as part of history's ideological function. Historical knowledge is this way can awaken consciousness that is fixed in a dream-state. Thus, the material world can be redeemed through allegory (or dialectical images) rather than historical myth (argued more extensively in his Trauerspiel study). History could be seen in terms of its discontinuity, perhaps of the distant past and the most modern in a montage-like construction. Thus 'the dialectical penetration and actualization of the past as it connects with the present is the test of the truth of present action.' (in Buck-Morss, 1995: 288)

Susan Buck-Morss explains how a literal translation of 'Geschichtsphilosophie' into English is misleading. In German, two concepts come together (in a montage, like other compound words in German) to construct, not a philosophy of history, but a philosophy out of history in reconstructing historical material as philosophy (1995: 55). In contrast to traditional philosophy, the approach of Benjamin looks for truth in the 'garbage heap', the 'rags, the trash', the 'ruins of commodity production' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 217-8; citing 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'). 
[see notes on dust and ordure project] 

The theory of evolution is relevant here in arguing that nature unfolding in a non-repetitive way. In its time, this has a critical function to underline creationist belief but has since been corrupted to explain domination of one social group over another (this is further complicated if one builds in Benjamin's own considerable interest to Messianism and the Kabbalah to understand the nature of historical progress and redemption - that would be too much of a tangent in this connection). A reading of evolution that poses nature and history as dialectically opposed immediately reveals inherent contradictions in Social Darwinism making for a more dynamic understanding of natural history. Buck-Morss quotes Benjamin: 'No historical category without natural substance; no natural substance without its historical filter.' (1995: 59) Natural history is simultaneously ideological and holds the potential to reveal the truth and therefore incites action. For Benjamin, Darwin's thesis of natural selection is simply too bound to the notion of progress as automatic. Indeed, 'There is nothing natural about history's progression.' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 80) 
    

Montage:
Benjamin, in rejecting and being rejected by academia, turned his attention to mass culture and the marketplace, asking:
'Was it possible, despite capitalist form, to subvert these cultural apparatuses from within? The effect of technology on both work and leisure in the modern metropolis had been to shatter experience into fragments, and journalistic style reflected that fragmentation. Could montage as the formal principle of the new technology be used to reconstruct an experiential world so that it provided a coherence of vision necessary for philosophical reflection?' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 23)

--

Collecting:
'Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the
poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other
things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership [...] also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional,
utilitarian value - that is, their usefulness - but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.'

Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking My Library', Illuminations, trans Harry Zohn, (New York: Pimlico) p. 62.