The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
by John Lewis Gaddis
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Lewis GaddisEdition: Paperback
Published: 2004-04-08
ISBN: 0195171578
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Book Review: History as an art or science?
Summary: 4 Stars
In Cretaceous North America a Tyrannosaurus Rex, using his small forelimbs to position a recently killed Apatosaurus, rips apart a piece of flesh with his razor sharp teeth. Was the Tyrannosaurus Rex a true hunter, or nothing more than a scavenger, impeded by his small forelimbs? John Lewis Gaddis's book The Landscape of History uses metaphors to place historians within the realm of paleontologists and the "new" scientists (41). Gaddis, by using an excessive amount of metaphors, explores the historical consciousness; the historical mind which is related more to "new" sciences than the methods practiced by social scientists. Gaddis also points out the tensions that arise by studying history; the tension between being liberated and oppressed, mastery and humility, detachment and engagement (129). Gaddis's work spans the fields of theoretical physics to political science, and history from the big bang to the personality cults of Stalin and Mao, and arguing throughout history's place is in the realm between art and science, while utilizing the tools of "new" science.
Gaddis uses Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, to describe history as a physical landscape (5). The job of a historian is to represent the landscape of history. The historian's ability to be both detached and engaged with the landscape provides the historian with the ability to be many places at once, and being able to compare those events (24-25). The historian's method in analyzing the landscape is the method of "new" science. "New" science is more detached from Newtonian theory and predictable experiments, by taking into account multiple variables in a given event, and at the same time realizing in the chaos there is order (76-77).
Gaddis describes Stalin's formative years of smashing a bird's skull, and causing the suicide of his wife, as fractal geometry (117-118). Gaddis overdoes his use of metaphors in describing historical methods. Although his use of sources is wide, ranging from different periods and different areas of history, it seems adolescent at times, especially when Gaddis uses movies that are questionable in their relationship to the methodology of history (113-114). It is distracting to move from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft to the film Being John Malkovich. Even though his wide range of sources are impressive, he over generalizes examples. For instance, he portrays Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as aliens, imposing their will upon an atomized society, but does not include the research done by social historians and the impact of the "bottom" upon the "top" (127). Gaddis is clearly at his weakest in his attempt to moralize history, and fails to acknowledge leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were not aliens, but operated within larger historical and cultural contexts.
Gaddis definitely stays with his argument that history is a landscape and should be described by using the tools of the "new" sciences. By describing the landscape, historians are affected by tensions of historical study, such as, being both master of the landscape and its subject. Gaddis's disparate sources and use of metaphors is excessive, causing over generalizations. These over generalizations contradict Gaddis's argument that history is more closely related to the "new" sciences, because the variables that compose the larger picture are forgotten in Gaddis's attempt at being the Stephen Hawking of history. When Gaddis avoids these generalizations his interpretation of history can be both intriguing and provocative.
Summary of The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
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.
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