Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 901
EAN num: 9780195066524
ISBN number: 0195066529
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: 2002-09
Publishing house: Oxford University Press, USA
Sale Popularity Level: 496918
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
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' humour makes a philosophical discusion 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.
Rated by buyers 
-
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, endeavor 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 discusion 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.
Rated by buyers 
-
I had the privilege of attending Prof. Gaddis' lectures in Oxford, and enjoyed every minute of it. His writing accurately reflects the lectures; the only thing missing is the Q&A at the end.
This is not a methodological how-to for historians, it is a philosophical look at the tradecraft, mostly done by comparing it to other disciplines, especially the hard sciences and social sciences. Historians will no doubt enjoy reviewing (maybe reitering) what they've been doing all along; students will undoubtedly learn much from this study.
Many of the critical comments during the Q&A reflected current fads in historiography, such as subaltern studies, triumphalism, etc. Some of this made it into the book, in Prof. Gaddis' emphasis on solid academic analysis. It is impossible to achieve a totally detached point of view, but the historian should strive toward that goal through the rigors of an honest review of the facts, and the subsequent interpretation. Causation is a difficult point here, in that the latest fads endeavor to ascribe causation to whatever their favorite subaltern. Prof. Gaddis notes that causation is perhaps the best we can hope for, turning the clock backwards, searching for the point of no return in events leading to the subject in question.
His use of metaphors lends much humour to the book, I especially empathized with the one about the spilled truckload of Marmite on the highway between Oxford and London.
All in all, a delightful book to read, I hope it quickly replaces the really tedious textbooks normally assigned to the study of historiography; it will add greatly to classes on methodology.
Thanks you, Prof. Gaddis, for this witty, eminently readable gem of a book.
Rated by buyers 
-
First delivered as lectures at Oxford, "The Landscape of History" is eloquent, short, witty -- and evanescent. The reader should know that author Gaddis does NOT describe how historians weigh evidence and construct narratives about the past on the basis of surviving documents and other data. Instead, he attempts to put the discipline of history on a solid intellectual foundation by stressing its similarities to observation-based disciplines such as astronomy and paleontology, which, like history, do not rely on repeatable laboratory experiments yet manage to achieve the status of "hard" sciences. The effort to defend history's intellectual credentials is unnecessary since our ability to make sense of past human conduct is part of human self-understanding and thus stands in no need of "foundations." It is also farfetched: I almost put down the book for good when Gaddis outlined the affinities between biography and fractal geometry. On the other hand, the chapter on causation and counterfactuals is quite good. My advice to prospective buyers: wait for "The Landscape of History" to show up in remaindered book catalogues, which should happen by 2004. In the meantime, read some essays on historiography by Isaiah Berlin or Michael Oakeshott.
Rated by buyers -
If it wasn't for Gaddis' reputation as a historian, I doubt this little book would have garnered so much attention. Gaddis had noble aspirations to complete the studies of Bloch and Carr, but unfortunately those aspirations seemed to get the better of him, as he came up far short of his predecessors. There are some clever little musings in this collection of essays, but very little that reveals the art or science of history.
He starts with the evocative painting on the cover, referring to history as mist-shrouded landscape which historians hope to reveal. If he would have stuck with this metaphor, and elaborated on it in a series of revealing essays, then this might have indeed been a trenchant study of history. Instead, Gaddis unabashedly lets the metaphors fall where they may, mixing them freely, and in the end coming up with a fog as thick as pea soup.
He makes a case for the narrative form in history, at the expense of the "mechanical view" fostered by the study of the natural sciences. It has only been since the natural sciences adopted the the narrative form with its inherit complexities that Gaddis feels the natural sciences have come closer to the approach historians use to reveal the past. But, Gaddis is too caught up in his use of metaphors to reveal the "ductwork" of the Historian's craft. In the end, he says that this is the principal tool historians have at their disposal to relate the past to the present.
These essays may have made for charming lectures at Oxford, but they don't stand up so well in printed form. Gaddis paints the study of history with a very broad brush, with some rather sweeping generalizations of the other sciences.
Find other books like this one:
