Bibliograph

The landscape of history, how historians map the past, John Lewis Gaddis

Type

Label

The landscape of history, how historians map the past, John Lewis Gaddis

Language

eng

resource.accompanyingMatter

technical information on music

Form of composition

not applicable

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not applicable

Literary text for sound recordings

other

Main title

The landscape of history

Responsibility statement

John Lewis Gaddis

Sub title

how historians map the past

Summary

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

Target audience

adult

Transposition and arrangement

not applicable

Classification

Contributor