The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past [Hardcover]

John Lewis Gaddis (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195066529 | ISBN-13: 978-0195066524 | Publication Date: September 2002 | Edition: 1st edition,

What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.
Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy.
Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Two classics of historiography, The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch (1953) and What Is History? by E. H. Carr (1961), have prompted notable cold war historian Gaddis to offer his own abstract of what historians do. Does the methodology of historians captivate readers of popular history? Those sensitive to a historian's attitudes might be intrigued by this disquisition into the "ductwork" installed in every piece of historical writing. In discussing ductwork, the concepts by which a historian selects facts, comprehends time and space, and ultimately presents the past, Gaddis hews to two central tenets: that there is, somewhere, an objective truth in history, and that history is a science. Those ideas have been severely challenged, especially by social scientists enamored of quantitative methods. Gaddis dismisses quantification alone as unworkable and inappropriate and says historians must combine the techniques of many disciplines. A technical but provocative inquiry for sophisticated history readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"A masterful statement on the historical method by a distinguished Cold War historian.... Gaddis' most provocative claim is a powerful irony: Social science, with its independent variables and deductive theories, would appear to have more scientific pretensions than does history. But the historical method, which relies on thought experiments and the interplay of inductive and deductive reasoning, more fully shares the methodical logic of such fields as astronomy, paleontology, and evolutionary biology. Gaddis' characterization of the social sciences will surely spark debate even as it illuminates important intellectual connections between the disciplines. Delightfully readable, the book is a grand celebration of the pursuit of knowledge."--Foreign Affairs

"A bold and challenging book, unafraid of inviting controversy. It provides a strong statement for our time of both the limits and the value of the historical enterprise."--Alan Brinkley, New York Times Book Review

"Never before have I come across a book that so illuminated the craft of the historian.... Gaddis has a delightful command of language--and a delight in it. He draws on Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain, contemporary movies, Thucydides, Tom Stoppard, Woody Allen and lots more.... He is a distinguished scholar who writes with a clarity and a lack of pedantry that is quite marvelous. Equally impressive, he's not afraid of a rip-roaring fight with his fellow academics."--Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

"An urbane and eloquent little volume.... Gaddis's learned and graceful reflections on all of these questions are deeply humane, propelled by the conviction that only by sustaining a historical consciousness can we know where we should want to go. They will also never allow either the reader of history or the writer of it to think about the past in quite the same way as before."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Rewarding and readable, with unusual thinking and delightful comparisons that range from art to music to contemporary films such as 'Shakespeare in Love' and 'Being John Malkovich....' Thought-provoking and even funny, challenging but also accessible to amateurs who read history but are ready to think more seriously about its methodology."--Associated Press (in The Chicago Tribune)

"This is another of those books that rewards the effort it requires. Besides providing invaluable insights into how the historian goes about his business, it teaches--like all really good books--of life beyond its boundaries."--Colin Walters, Washington Times

"Entertaining, masterful disquisition on the aims, limitations, design, and methods of historiography.... Employing a wide range of metaphors (from Cleopatra's nose to Napoleon's underwear), displaying an extensive knowledge of current thinking in mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology, alluding frequently to figures as disparate as Lee Harvey Oswald, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Lennon, and John Malkovich, Gaddis guides us on a genial trip into the historical method and the imagination that informs it.... Provocative, polymathic, and pleasurable."--Kirkus Reviews

"The Landscape of History explores recent, surprising convergences of natural science and human history and does so with clarity, charm and easy erudition. Gaddis's book is a real tour de force: a delight to read, and a light-hearted celebration of the odd, 'fractal' patterns that intellectual and other forms of human and natural history exhibit."--William H. McNeill

"In this landmark study Gaddis brilliantly distills many of his previous analyses of the relationship of historical thinking to the social sciences and the hard sciences as well."--Alexander George, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1st edition, edition (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195066529
• ISBN-13: 978-0195066524
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #847,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Philosophy Without the Pain, March 18, 2004

By 

John Jefferson (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Hardcover)

Gaddis examines the nature of history and the function of historians through a wide range of metaphors. By putting forth the question: How long is the British coast line? Gaddis immediately sets out that if we measure in miles we won't get to the alcoves and cubbyholes and we'll probably end up with a nice round number. If we measure in microns and millimeters, it'll take a while but we'll measure every single bend and dog leg and we'll have a much larger number. Many of Gaddis' metaphors spur philosophical discussions but he does not approach them with a philosophical background, instead he sets out to solve a functional question: What is history? Is it a natural science? If it is, then why can we not replicate any historical findings as biology and physiology can? Is it a social science? Then why do other social sciences like economics and anthropology try to find an independent variable upon which everything hangs when historians try to put out the bigger picture? Gaddis' conclusion then is that history is its own beast. It does not mirror either the hard sciences nor the social sciences although it may pick up some of their properties.

Gaddis uses metaphors that seem to have little connection with hsitory, such as fractal geometry and natural sciences. The connections are then developed and this may be a way of making scientists understand the nature of history or giving students with a familiarity in natural sciences a correlation to the study of history. Also, Gaddis' humor makes a philosophical discussion of history a little less tense and certainly more cheerful.

All in all, this book is very readable for a historiography and may appeal to non-historians seeking a perspective on history. The chapters read more like the text of a speech than a textbook so the minimal 140 or so pages will make this a very easy read.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Above the Sea of Fog, December 3, 2002

By 

Casmar Wilson (Lawrence, KS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Hardcover)

In the opening pages of his new work, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, John Lewis Gaddis shares an anecdote. Back in 1938, Gertrude Stein took an airline flight over the United States. From her window seat, Stein realized that the landscape, now far below, had acquired a very distinct form:

[W]hen I looked at the earth I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there on earth the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves. (4)

Stein's revelation, writes Gaddis, captures the essence of the historian's task: that of discarding one's immediate context to explore the broader horizon of human experience.
The Landscape of History is an intriguing analysis of the individual's relationship to the broad expanse of the past. It evaluates, specifically, the role of the historian in surveying and portraying elements of this expanse to the modern eye.
Gaddis's talent lies in his treatment of the historian's job as both an art and a science. The study of history, he claims, is suspended somewhere between these two extremes of representation. The historian, like a cartographer, combines the technique of an artist and the method of the scientist. As he maps out the landscape of man's existence, he not only employs tools of precision, but also applies his imagination toward "[reducing] the infinitely complex to a finite, manageable, frame of reference" (32).
This provocative work, traversing as it does over a wide range of ideas, holds something of interest for every reader. The quintessential academic will delight in Gaddis's pithy analyses of fellow historians, such as Paul Johnson, author of The Birth of the Modern, and William H. McNeill of Plagues and Peoples fame. The artiste will appreciate Gaddis's juxtaposition of Jan van Eyck's artwork with Pablo Picasso's, and Virginia Woolf's risqué writings with the cut-and-dried biographical epics of Henry Adams.
Those of us who may be neither very academic nor very artistic, but simply enjoy a stimulating, well-written book, will immediately identify with Gaddis's friendly, conversational writing style. Do not be intimidated by such Oxfordian-sounding concepts as "particular generalization," "general particularization," or "causation, contingency, and counterfactuals" (62, 63, 91). Gaddis quickly follows up on such pretentious language with colorful, yet intelligent, illustrations. You will not find too many other historians who compare Thucydides' work to Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," or who see hobbit-like tendencies in contemporary social scientists (13, 92).
However enjoyable Gaddis's writing and ideas may be, he fails to impose limits on himself in the exploration of his topic. In his zeal to compare and contrast different fields of study and their methods, he overextends himself, creating inconsistencies in his analysis. For example, he links evolutionary theory with the study of history, claiming that both "practice the remote sensing of phenomena with which they can never directly interact" (44). Leaving aside the debate of whether or not one can interact with history as it occurs around us, this comparison fails to provide Gaddis's intended link between natural science and history. Evolutionary theory, dealing as it does with lower forms of life, does not match Gaddis's almost spiritual portrayal of history as the seamless story of mankind.
Despite such gaps, Gaddis's book is a delightful read. All readers will identify with his invitation to explore our identity through our past, and to gaze in wonder on the broad expanse of time both behind and before us. He will have us asking of ourselves, along with Twelfth Night's Viola, "What country, friends, is this?" (16).

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a "how-to", May 1, 2003

By 

Mark Robson "MER" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Hardcover)

This short (151 pages) book, really an extended essay, is more of a philosophical meditation on the nature of the historian's craft than it is an instruction manual of historical method. But this is not an esoteric treatise on the nature of causation, or a reflection on such deep questions as the nature of truth, although these issues are addressed briefly, particularly in the chapter entitled, "Causation, Contingency, and Counterfactuals." Most of the work, however, is devoted to various comparisons of History with Science. There are some tremendously interesting observations here. Gaddis points out that many branches of science, such as geology and evolutionary science, are founded on propositions that are no more experimentally verifiable than are the observations of historians. It is worth noting that these, like history, deal with events that occur over extended periods of time. He also draws parallels with modern physics (relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) and fractal geometry, and makes allusions to certain aspects of chaos theory and set theory. One scientific area that he does not mention is computer science, but the study of neural networks and programs employing "fuzzy logic" could also be used to bolster his contention that many fields of modern science contain within their basic postulates an element of uncertainty and unpredictability that mirror the apparent capriciousness of the course of human affairs. He draws a distinction between those areas of science and others, particularly the "social sciences" and especially economics, which, in his view, attempt to describe complex problems in terms of rigid, categorically independent and dependent variables. Because these approaches oversimplify to the point of absurdity, he argues that they cannot approximate, or, in his formulation, "represent" reality to an acceptable degree.

There is much in this short book to provoke thought. I don't know much about chaos theory or fractal geometry, and so I cannot comment as to whether Gaddis is merely picking and choosing from the periphery of those fields to illustrate his point, or whether he is truly describing fundamental similarities. Certainly, he does not provide detailed descriptions. And that, perhaps, is the main weakness of the book. The flip tone that he employs at numerous points undermines the seriousness of the discussion and contributes to an impression of a dilettantism, which is not mitigated by a more detailed description of the complex scientific concepts to which he alludes. The overall sense is of undergraduate lectures by a bright professor who is trying to connect his young audience with some difficult concepts. In some ways, however, that is a strength, in that the argument is more accessible than it would be otherwise. But there is a price to be paid.