The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis
The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis
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The Landscape of History
How Historians Map the Past

Author: John Lewis Gaddis

Narrator: Jack Chekijian

Unabridged: 12 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/14/2017


Synopsis

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.

About John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. His books include The Cold War: A New History, George F. Kennan: An American Life, and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Riku on June 20, 2018

Gaddis proposes to show the nitty-gritty of history writing - the blueprints of how a historian constructs his structures, and promises to use an over-abundance of crazy metaphors to do this. Who can resist that proposal? The aim of the book is to look at the process of creating and comprehending hi......more

Goodreads review by Guy on June 01, 2008

For most of this book I found myself thinking, "This is a perfect example of the sort of discursive fluff that emeritus professors grant themselves license to write, but which they would have fiercely criticized if they had read while younger." Gaddis attempts to illuminate the work of the historian......more

Goodreads review by Oleksandr on May 05, 2021

This is a philosophical essay about what history is, what are its goals, etc. As such it actually covers a lot of subjects. I read is as a part of monthly reading for April 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group. The book starts with a picture that is on its cover - Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on July 15, 2016

Another excellent work from my favorite historian, this time about how historians think and how they differ from social scientists and scientists. One of my favorite points in the book was his discussion of social science, history, and non-laboratory sciences (geology, evolutionary biology, some fie......more