The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Gaddis, John Lewis
product information
Condition: New, UPC: 9780195171570, Publication Date: Thu, April 1, 2004, Type: Paperback ,
join & start selling
description
udy 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.

reviews

Be the first to write a review

member goods

No member items were found under this heading.

notems store

The Red Prince: The Life ...

by Audrey Moss

Paperback /Paperback

$12.24

The Case for Colonialism

by Gilley, Bruce

Paperback /Paperback

$18.74

Index, a History of the: ...

by Duncan, Dennis

Hardcover /Hardcover

$22.50

listens & views

UNBLUSHING BRASSINESS (JMLP) (JPN)

by KWESKIN,JIM

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$19.99

JUST A GLIMPSE

by MASON,BETH CHAMPION

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$15.75

FAMOUS

by LITTLE LARRY

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$119.25

Return Policy

All sales are final

Shipping

No special shipping considerations available.
Shipping fees determined at checkout.