The landscape of history : how historians map the past / John Lewis Gaddis.
| Author/creator | Gaddis, John Lewis author. |
| Format | Electronic |
| Publication | Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002. |
| Copyright Date | ©2002 |
| Description | 1 online resource (xii, 192 pages) : illustrations |
| Supplemental Content | ProQuest Ebook Central |
| Subjects |
| Physical medium | polychrome. |
| Contents | 1. The landscape of history -- 2. Time and space -- 3. Structure and process -- 4. The interdependency of variables -- 5. Chaos and complexity -- 6. Causation, contingency, and counterfactuals -- 7. Molecules with minds of their own -- 8. Seeing like a historian. |
| Abstract | 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. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Source of description | Online resource; title from PDF title page (ProQuest Ebook Central platform, viewed September 2, 2022). |
| Issued in other form | Print version: Gaddis, John Lewis. Landscape of history. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, ©2002 0195066529 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 9781429431095 (electronic bk.) |
| ISBN | 1429431091 (electronic bk.) |
| ISBN | 1280759755 |
| ISBN | 9781280759758 |
| ISBN | 9780195362053 |
| ISBN | 0195362055 |
| ISBN | 9786610759750 |
| ISBN | 6610759758 |
| ISBN | (Cloth) |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic Resources | Access Content Online | ✔ Available |