The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

by John Lewis Gaddis

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, School, Grad School, Historical, World History

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2002

Reviews

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up

Before starting my review I want to outline the one idea in the foreground of the book.
The historian E.H. Carr wrote: “It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.”
The same applies to history. History - all those processes that happened in the past - does not change because of various interpretations, new metrics in terms of which it is measured and remeasured, and the controversial character of some historical sources.

The book is an extended essay in which John Lewis Gaddis tries to answer several questions that are well known to most history buffs.
Why should we study history? What methods do historians use? Why does history matter in the modern world?

Did you know that history had some things in common with paleontology, cartography, tailoring, geology, and even fractal geometry? According to the author, the work of a historian, in certain aspects, resembles that of the above-mentioned disciplines.
I had better quote from the book: "history, like cartography, is necessarily a representation of reality." To replicate the past would be a manifest impossibility.
Like paleontologists, historians attempt to reconstruct the flesh of historical events and figures on the basis of relics - surviving bones that are accessible.
Unless a scholar has the privilege of traveling through time to the past in a time machine to see for sure, she must rely on such structures.
For a historian, those relics are structures generated by historical processes. History can be thought of as processes that took place at some point in the past.
The remnants of these processes that have persisted until our day are regarded as surviving structures.
Those structures embrace a wide range of archival documents, material objects (bones and excrement, tools and weapons), and cultural products (great ideas and works of art).
Historians work with representations of the past. If we allow ourselves some simplification, we may say that they process pieces of surviving information of different kinds (structures), put them through specific lenses (chosen discourse), and come up with a representation (a historical narrative). The main goal of a narrative is to simulate what transpired in the past.

One of the metaphors, with which the essay abounds, concerns the idea of ‘fitting’. As Gaddis points out, "history operates by deriving processes from structures, by fitting representations to realities, by privileging neither induction nor deduction, by remaining open — the word is consilience — to what insights from one field can tell you about another."
While deducing historical facts and developing their representations, historians must try to reach a consensus among themselves.
At the same time, their representations are subject to constant standardizing based on comparing them to the surviving historical evidence.

For historians too start with surviving structures, whether they be archives, artifacts, or even memories. They then deduce the processes that produced them. Like geologists and paleontologists, they must allow for the fact that most sources from the past don’t survive, and that most daily events don’t even generate a survivable record in the first place.

Another metaphor that the author employs deals with maps. As no one needs the one-to-one map, no one needs a one-to-one correspondence between a representation and past reality it is intended to describe. Not to say that both are no more than mere chimeras.
Instead, people draw maps of different scales and expect them to serve a variety of purposes. A world map will not help us find our way around town. The same principle works for historical narratives.
A historical narrative is always an approximate description of this or that historical event. Many details would inevitably elude us.

Today history is becoming more and more polyphonic. There were and still are so many voices buried under a thick layer of silence. Scholars attempt to get them to the surface and work on making them audible. The current discourses include previously neglected metrics such as the role of women, minorities, discourse, sexuality, disease, and culture.

Also, Gaddis touches on the question of subjectivity. A scholar who spends many hours and days on their research is a human being with his or her predilections.
The likelihood of finding a completely unbiased researcher is no greater than winning a huge sum in the lottery.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, it seems, has been geared towards students and young researchers. Professional historians would probably find its content and main points too obvious. Much has been written about them (cf. The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch).
However, the author has succeeded in bringing the complexity of history to light.
The writing style, despite many striking metaphors and pertinent analogies, is somewhat boring. Thus, I have some doubts that amateurs would enjoy this text. On top of that, the author gets repetitive at times.
While reading I frequently wanted to take notes. For me, this does speak in favor of the book.

As a bonus, I invite you to have a look at a simple example (given below in italics) that describes the complexity of almost every case in history. Most events have several antecedents, or many things have to have happened in order for an event to take place. For this reason alone it would be very difficult for history to repeat itself, even if repeating patterns tend to recur with sufficient regularity to make themselves visible to scholars.

Marc Bloch speaks of a man falling to his death from a precipice. Many things had to have happened, Bloch pointed out, in order to produce this outcome: the man had to have slipped;
the path he was walking along had to have been built along the edge of a cliff; geological processes had to have uplifted the mountain from the plain; the law of gravity had to have been in effect; and, Bloch might have added, the Big Bang had to have occurred. Still, anyone
asked the cause of the accident would probably reply: “a misstep.” The reason, Bloch explained, is that this particular antecedent differed from all the others in several ways: “it occurred last; it was . . . the most exceptional in the general order of things; [and] finally, by virtue of this greater particularity, it seems the antecedent which could have been most easily avoided.”

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 history - as an act of creation, with its own processes, flaws and compromises. To illustrate this Gaddis suggests two contrasting positions for the historian - if you think of the past as a kind of landscape, then the historian (standing over the historical landscape like The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog in Friedrich’s 1818 painting) is always caught between these positions: of the simultaneous sense of significance and insignificance, of detachment and engagement, of mastery and humility, of the personal and the general. Being suspended between these polarities, and being aware of it, to Gaddis, is what historical consciousness is all about.

The various chapters focus one by one on how the historian can go about achieving that state of suspension: the manipulation of time, space, and scale; the derivation of past processes from surviving structures; the particularization of generalization; the integration of randomness with regularity; the differentiation of causes; the obligation to get inside the mind of another person, or another age, but then to find your way out again.

But the best part of the book is that through all of this Gaddis never disappoints on the promise he makes early on in the book - that the historian should indulge in metaphors, because much of history is about comparison and metaphors are the best aids to comparison and hence comprehension that we have. Outrageous metaphors abound, with time machines, fractals, never-ending coast lines, Roman roads and what not littering the pages, but always used as a means of pushing the readers into looking at some familiar issues in unfamiliar ways. He also dedicates a lot of time to how history, the sciences and the rest of the social sciences have tracked their methods over time and takes pride in the dogged subjective stance adopted by history throughout - and it makes us realise that it is in fact true - historian seem to be the one bunch of scholars who have admirable resisted physics envy and stuck to their guns. Kudos to them! The biggest insight from this discussion is to observe how history tracks closer to the non-laboratory sciences like geology and cosmology in having to "imagine" processes to account for observed structures/results.

After establishing, quite nicely I must say, the historical process and the limitations as well as the strengths of it, Gaddis finally turns from the What and How of history to the Why of history, and here the book disappoints. He only inverts the driving metaphor of the book - Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog - and invites the reader to make an immediate shift in perspective - of seeing the painting not as the historian looking out across the past shrouded in fog, but at the future. It might have sounded poignant and grand when writing it, but after reading through a couple of hundred pages to arrive at a rhetorical conclusion, I have to report it doesn't sound as grand in the reading. Nevertheless, a must read for students of history.

[Guy · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 with references to time machines, black holes, number theory, fractals, chaos theory, quantum physics, consciousness, ecology, and God knows what else, all the while displaying that he doesn't have much clue about the subjects he refers to, and thus rendering somewhat questionable the conclusions he draws from such comparisons.

In the midst of this, he spends a long chapter ridiculing social science in a witty but superficial way that reads more like a coffee-and-cigarettes-fueled common-room debate than a reasoned and analytical argument. I'm not defending social science here, which I think often suffers from the ills Gaddis refers to, but rather criticizing the unseriousness of the approach.

Then there is the repetition, of concepts, arguments, and examples. The book was adapted from a series of lectures, and it shows. Perhaps it is necessary to remind listeners of what you talked about last week or a few weeks ago, but not readers who can, if they feel the need, simply open the book at the earlier point to refresh their memories. In addition, the sort of humor that works in a lecture probably shouldn't be directly transferred to the printed page.

I almost abandoned the book at several points, which would have been a pity, because almost hidden underneath the blizzard of flippant comments and airy metaphors are some important topics about which Gaddis has some interesting things to say, namely: what is it that historians do, what does it mean to say that a work of historical scholarship has been done well, and what is it good for?

There's an excellent book to be written about these topics... but this isn't that book.

[Sense of History]

Two things I appreciate about this book: Gaddis' pragmatism and his attempt to put the writing of history back on the scientific map.

His pragmatism builds on a very post-modern vision of history: the past is a foreign country, we can only represent it, by giving meaning to the remnants of the past in terms of what they explain. It's like making a map of a landscape: also a selection, but a quite useful one. Just as there can be different maps of the same landscape, there are also different descriptions (Gaddis chooses the word 'narratives') of the past possible; all of which are "true", as far as they lean as close to reality as possible. No relativism with Gaddis ("there is truth"): the past is not irremediable gone, it is definitely out there, open to questioning by us in the present, and even sometimes actively adjusting our look on it: "the history these representations represent has not changed. It’s back there in the past, just as solidly as that still imprecisely measured coastline. It’s this reality that keeps our representations from flying into fantasy"(p.125).

Precisely because there are different ways of mapping the landscape of the past, we must be open to methodological tolerance, that too is pragmatism: "Within a single narrative we can be Rankeans, or Marxists, or Freudians, or Weberians, or even postmodernists, to the extent that these modes of representation bring us closer to the realities for which we're trying to account. We're free to describe, evoke, quantify, qualify, and even reify if these techniques serve to improve the 'fit' we're trying to achieve. Whatever works, in short we should use."(108). And finally, it is the continuing debate among historians (and non-historians) on the outcome of these different approaches, which may lead to a consensus about the past, albeit a provisional one.

Second merit: history indeed is a science! Historians according to Gaddis are scientific experimentalists par excellence, they constantly test their conclusions on what sources say. Thus they do exactly what the "hard" scientists more and more do, in an ongoing revision of intuitive, practical and theoretical approaches, "fitting things together". He even offers a bold reversal of thought: Gaddis refers to the chaos and complexity theory to suggest that the hard sciences gradually move in the direction of what historians have long been doing: approaching reality as a complex system, a web-like thing where everything is connected to everything. Obviously he doesn't focus on the scientists in their laboratory, but rather on geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, evolutionary biologists etc.

I'm not so pleased, though, with Gaddis' quite crude attack on social sciences, and their supposed reductionism: "The methods of historians are closer to those of certain natural scientists than to those of most social scientists- because too many social scientists in their efforts to specify independent variables have lost sight of a basic requirement of theory, which is to account for reality. They reduce complexity to simplicity in order to anticipate the future, but in doing so they oversimplify the past "(p.71). That tempts him into outright derogatory statements: "Historians are in much less demand than social scientists when it comes to making recommandations for future policy. We have the consolation in contrast to them, though, of more often getting things right"(p.58). Perhaps that is true for certain trends in the social sciences, but I think Gaddis here is generalizing too much and perhaps more expresses a personal inferiority complex as a historian.

Anyway, Gaddis is right that when historians adhere to their pragmatic methodology, they are building a sound scientific view of reality, different perhaps, but as meritorious as that of other sciences. And that is no small achievement. I really loved this little book.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Lewis Gaddis builds on the work of Marc Bloch and E. H. Carr, two renowned historians that have eloquently put into words where the writing of history actually stands for, what its own epistemological criteria and methodological rules are. Fortunately, Gaddis has integrated - 50 years later - the profound changes that have happened in the meantime in historiography and in the sciences in general.
This is, in the first place, postmodernism and especially the "cultural turn" of Hayden White and others. Gaddis rightly points out that historiography only gives a representation of the past, in the form of a story (a narrative), and not the past itself. At the same time he fiercely defends the value of that representation, provided that it fits as close as possible to reality (supported by sources) and leaves room for questioning so that a final consensus can grow between professional and non-professional observers of the past. Gaddis has a very pragmatic view, he constantly compares the writing of history to the making of a map (in which the past obviously is a kind of landscape); he firmly rejects relativism, because according to him there is indeed a reality of the past that continually allows querying by us (every time from a different present).
Gaddis also devotes many pages to the question whether history actually is a science, a question that has intrigued and divided historians and non-historians since the beginning of the 20th century. Surprisingly, Gaddis argues that history leans much more to some of the hard sciences than the social sciences do. He zooms in on elements of the chaos- and complexity theory that have pushed the hard sciences to take into account the uncertainty principle in complex systems. History did so much earlier, he states, because ultimately the past is an extremely complex system. That is a worthy argument, with which historians finally can get rid of their frustration and minority complex. But Gaddis drives his thesis too far, especially in his provocative stance on the social sciences. According to him social scientists are stuck in earlier (positivist) thinking patterns, and in their obsessive quest for independent variables they only end up with models that barely touch reality. Interesting and to some extent correct, for sure, but to my feeling not quite fair for the social sciences in general.
In short, this is definitely an interesting book, which apart from a number of provocative statements, finally puts historiography back on the "scientific" map.

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long ago I took a histiography seminar. Since I often read histories, I wanted to sharpened my histiographical understanding.

As one approaches the end date, courage increases, a need to share Experience and Wisdom becomes imperative. John Lewis Gaddis took an opportunity to tell us his experience and wisdom by using various material and immaterial cultural elements, focusing on the material, to explain his relationship to writing history.

A familiarity with WWII and the Cold War--just a working one--allows access to this gem. I am glad that I read Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid in 2019 in which I was reminded of the continuing Cold War.

I have selected a few quotes to include here. There are other concepts and ideas to reread and reconsider. A gem.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 above the Sea of Fog. The author compares the man on the picture with a historian, who looks on the fog of past from the present (and we, watchers, look at him from a future). Then he goes with Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about “the Cartographers Guilds struck a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” – just like such a map lacks any sense, so a historian doesn’t represent the history in its fullness, but selects some items over others. Just like a road map omits things that are important for e.g. weather map, a history should serve some goals set by a historian. However, this relativity and inherent bias of a research doesn’t not mean that postmodernist critique of in attainability of truth is valid:
“It would be most unwise for sailors to conclude, simply because we cannot specify the length of the British coastline, that it isn’t there and that they can sail self-confidently through it. So too it would be imprudent for historians to decide, from the fact that we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space, that they can’t know anything about what happened within them. "

Then he follows with a question is a history a science? He argues that a more correct question should be which sciences are similar to history? - disciplines that depend upon thought experiments, like astronomy, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology, phenomena that rarely fit within laboratories, and the time required to see results can exceed the life spans of those who seek them. Like geologists and paleontologists, they must allow for the fact that most sources from the past don’t survive, and that most daily events don’t even generate a survivable record in the first place. Like biologists and astrophysicists, they must deal with ambiguous or even contradictory evidence. And like all scientists who work outside of laboratories, historians must use logic and imagination to overcome the resulting difficulties, their own equivalent of thought experiments.

According to him, history differs from other social sciences is that while they try to distinguish independent from dependent variables (reductionism), history stresses interconnections, thus has an ecological view of reality. While the ecological approach also values the specification of simple components, it does not stop with that: it considers how components interact to become systems whose nature can’t be defined merely by calculating the sum of their parts. It allows for fundamental particles, but it seeks to place them within an equally fundamental universe. The ecological viewpoint is inclusive, even as the reductionist perspective is exclusive. Reductionism within the social sciences actually comes from their attempts to forecast the future. Historians are, as a consequence, in much less demand than social scientists when it comes to making recommendations for future policy. So they err less :)

More interesting is that for him the methods of historians are closer to those of certain natural scientists than to those of most social scientists. The reason, is that too many social scientists, in their efforts to specify independent variables, have lost sight of a basic requirement of theory, which is to account for reality. They reduce complexity to simplicity in order to anticipate the future, but in doing so they oversimplify the past. They are still in Newtonian concept of clockwork universe, while both physics (and history) moved ahead, to chaos theory, to Henri Poincaré’s ideas that some things are predictable and some are not; regularities coexist with apparent randomness; both simplicity and complexity characterize the world in which we live.

Then he in depth looks at a problem of causation – an impossibility to get the initial cause, for each has something preceding it, like any person had parents back ad infinitum. First, the distinction is between the immediate, the intermediate, and the distant. Historians tend to start with some particular phenomenon—large or small—and then trace its antecedents. Or, they begin with structures and then derive the processes that produced them. As he shows:

It would make no sense, for example, to begin an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the launching of the planes from their carriers: you’d want to know how the carriers came to be within range of Hawaii, which requires explaining why the government in Tokyo chose to risk war with the United States. But you can’t do that without discussing the American oil embargo against Japan, which in turn was a response to the Japanese takeover of French Indochina. Which of course resulted from the opportunity provided by France’s defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, together with the frustrations Japan had encountered in trying to conquer China. Accounting for all of this, however, would require some attention to the rise of authoritarianism and militarism during the 1930s, which in turn had something to do with the Great Depression as well as the perceived inequities of the post—World War I settlement, and so on. You could continue this process all the way back to the moment, hundreds of millions of years earlier, when the first Japanese island rose up, in great billowing clouds of steam and smoke, from what was to become the Pacific Ocean. However, we don’t usually go back quite that far.

Finally, he raises a question of moral judgements in history. Should a historian take sides? Nobody worries, within the “hard” sciences, about the morality of molecules. But no work of history has ever been written without making some kind of statement—explicitly or implicitly, consciously or subconsciously—about where its subjects lie along the ubiquitous spectrum that separates the admirable from the abhorrent. You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms. Nor, according to him should you try to do so. Because no two historians will ever perform this task in just the same way, there can be no single standard for objectivity in biography, or for that matter in all of history. There’ll never be a consensus on the reputation of Peter the Great, any more than there’ll be on the length of the British coastline. There certainly is a consensus, though, on the existence of both, and indeed on the fact that the former once sailed along the latter.

An interesting mix of ideas.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 2 out of 5]

A reactionary Cold War historian (a friend and an advisor to George W. Bush) was invited to Oxford to share his invaluable musings on historical writing. Given plenty of time and good food, he coined metaphors about the profession and freehandedly slandered the leaders of communism.

Thus we learn about "horrendous examples" of "what Hitler did in Germany, what Lenin and Stalin did in the Soviet Union and what Mao Zedong did in China" (p. 127). Gaddis is shameless in employing cheap anti-communist myths like an extremely intolerant Stalin who even crushed his parrot's head because he felt like the parrot was humiliating him (p. 117).

But meanwhile, Winston Churchill, the supervisor of Bengal Famine in India, which killed nearly 3 million people; Churchill the white supremacist who was involved in the construction of the concentration camps in South Africa and Churchill the instigator of 1944 Athens Massacre is cherished as "the great man" (s. 138).

This book is more about a reactionary historian's way of thinking than the historical writing in general.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughts soon.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 fields of physics etc). In a weird way, the non-lab sciences do something quite similar to historians: they look at structures and phenomena that exist in the present (the equivalent of sources) and project into the past narratives about the processes that created those phenomena. A historian does basically the same thing when she, for example, excavates the history of a building, an institution, an ideology, or an event. In contrast, the social sciences seem stuck with a desire to imitate lab sciences by forming hypotheses that can be tested empirically and that explain multiple, disparate phenomena. What you often end up with is conclusions that are either broad and obvious (people pursue their interests, thanks rational choice!) or deterministic in the sense that individual narratives are forced into broader theoretical frameworks. While my knowledge of the hard sciences is limited, I thought the idea that non-lab sciences and history both focus on narrative, in contrast to social science, was very compelling. I'd love to hear from some hard scientists on this.

The key difference that Gaddis sketches out between history and social science seems to be the existence of independent variables. Historians approach causation holistically: they find it difficult and counterproductive to tease out the condition or decision that if removed from or added to a set of cases would trigger a similar outcome. They believe that in human affairs (molecules with minds of their own, as Gaddis puts it) you can't separate one causal factor from another as the "switch factor" that determines the event. Causation for us is about how forces, ideas, personalities, cultures etc (variables, if you will) interact and ping off each other, forming often unpredictable outcomes that are highly rooted in context. Social science also creates a significant confirmation bias: if you think factor X (geography, GDP, type of government, rational self-interest) was most important to causing a certain event, you are likely to find and focus on that side of the story. This is why I caution historians against reading too much social science or critical (race, gender, etc) theory. It creates a sort of a priori "here's how phenomenon X works, let's go see how in case Z" bias in people's work. They will certainly find what they are looking for, but that doesn't mean they are improving our understanding of the historical event or process. Gaddis seems keen on this risk even though he has been quite engaged with international relations theorists throughout his career (as historians should be). He's tough on social scientists, but his criticisms are well-informed and measured.

Lastly, I liked Gaddis' point about history as a personally and socially liberating discipline. He's not talking about history as advocacy here, a major problem in today's scholarship (and all other times as well). What he means is that historians are moral beings and can't totally separate what they study from judgement about the material. If history is going to have a tilt towards liberation or oppression, it should tilt towards liberation. Here's how: history shows us that the sources of oppression and suffering are human in origin, contextual, and contingent on certain circumstances and conditions. Within reason, what is made by human beings can be unmade, at least in part. It's clear that rights revolutions throughout the world have deployed history in this way. Historians need not be open advocates for certain political positions to show how systems of oppression or disastrous decision came to pass. We are probably the best equipped discipline to do this, and we should do so as objectively and concretely as possible. As Winthrop Jordan, a great historian of racism in Western culture, once put it:

A comprehension of the past seems to have two
opposite advantages in the present: it makes us aware of how
different people have been in other ages and accordingly enlarges
our awareness of the possibilities of human experience, and at the
same time it impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings
which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to at
least in the immediate future.

This book is very useful for graduate students who want to poke their heads out of the archives for a day and think about their profession more broadly. I also recommend it for historians or social scientists who are interested in the differences and similarities between their disciplines.

[Eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may have enjoyed this one a little too much. Honestly, what a profound book. Not only is this a great work on historiography, it contains remarkable insights about the world as well. Furthermore, Gaddis' personality throughout was a delight. I did have some small problems with it, but overall a great book nonetheless.

[☄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

gets a little bogged down in the middle, but such a necessary text! feeling calmer & more reassured than i have in a while :o)

[Sycamore · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Landscape of History is a short work whose prevailing tone is that of an old scholar passing wisdom on to a young one. Gaddis is enthusiastic about the nature of history and its problems, and his well intentioned disposition are everywhere visible in the book. It is hard not to like Mr. Gaddis for his good faith and honesty. I did not get much more out of the book than that.

Gaddis’ deployment of endless metaphor, usually for things that are easily described and understood without metaphor, was distracting and held up the flow of ideas rather than helped. A good lesson to resist the temptation to think one is being eloquent by the use of excessive metaphor. The worst of this was his obsession with using the trifecta of Hitler, Stalin and Mao every time he needed an example of evil and/or tyranny. This was combined with a horrific habit of likening historiographic considerations to the plots of recent films, the films themselves also becoming a distraction. Trying to wrap one’s head around how Being John Malkovich depicts the problems of the biographer was a time-waster and bore at best small fruit. Like picking blueberries in a watermelon patch.

The substantive problems with his work were no less confused. Gaddis seems interested and delighted in many subjects ranging from the natural sciences to the social sciences to the arts, but doesn’t know very much about any of them, or at least not enough to make strong insights about them. Gaddis’ thrust is that the historical method (whatever that is) is more like modern science than social science. Somehow, Gaddis sees history’s need to address the multiplicity of factors that shape an event and dash the hope of finding a single cause explanation (even a dual cause explanation would be nice from time to time), as being exactly like evolutionary science or astrophysics. Galaxies move according to infinite variables, as do species evolve, Gaddis observes. This is true insofar as we are exploring why a particular galaxy took a particular shape or trajectory, or why a particular species evolved along a certain path, Darwin’s finches or the present shape of the Andromeda galaxy are explained as precisely as the development of industrialism in Europe. But these sciences have also identified forces that shape the trajectories of all galaxies and all species in a way that history has not done sufficiently. There are competing theories but even Gaddis thinks history doesn’t have basic laws. Gaddis also stretches the definition of principles of scientific method to allow them to fit closely with history, and apparently is unaware of others. He appears to suggest that repeatability, prediction, quantification and the isolation of variables exist in the historical discipline in the same way they exist in the hard sciences. When they don’t fit at all, he makes a strange distinction between Newtonian “methods” and modern, one supposes, Quantum “methods.” I’m not sure what he means by that, except that experiment has been supplanted by theoretical mathematics and educated speculation. But of course, it hasn’t. On the other hand, Gaddis sees the search for key variables as somehow antiquated, but can’t do much of a job to articulate what the new way of “interdependent” variables does. This makes for great humor when Gaddis cites stories of other scholars and subjects of his histories reacting in consternation and shock to his visionary interpretations. He isn’t sure whether he is challenging the status quo, or if he hasn’t just failed to grasp a basic concept.

Gaddis’ more sinister problem, however, is that he never quite faces the issue of not knowing things. He arrives at the question of how to reconstruct the past, and does a pretty good job of showing that history is a representation, and that histories are like maps in that they are intended not to be a perfect reconstruction but are designed to suit their purpose, and hopefully many different kinds of maps will build a more subtle picture over time. But even in doing so, he never quite admits that sometimes historians are just making stuff up, and perhaps should take great care to be precise about when and how they do that. Indeed, he seems to suggest the opposite, that its all a wonderful part of duality of liberating and oppressing history.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, historiography. I read this for the sheer intellectual pleasure--and challenge--of grappling with difficult concepts, ideas, and material. The author compares the writing of history to both the hard sciences and the social sciences, and arrives at the surprising conclusion that history is much more like the former than the later. There was a lot of talk about fractals, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and chaos theory, for example. There were some ruminations about epistemology (and you know how I love epistemology!) There were lots of metaphors about the study of the past ("History is like a vast, misty landscape...") I have to say, I enjoyed this book quite a bit; it offered me some insights into how one can look at history, and how the social sciences--the area I am trained in--have come to focus on identifying 'dependent variables' while other sciences have moved toward a more holistic view of phenomena. History, the author argues, cannot be separated into distinct lines and rows; it is inherently messy, dependent on broad generalizations made from an almost infinite set of data, impossible to present objectively, and prone to being viewed through the changing lenses of contemporary morals.

Good stuff. 150 pages of hard academic subject matter that has absolutely no bearing on anything I do in my day to day life.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just started my graduate degree in History, having switched to the major for my MA after some quick and creative efforts were required for me to stay at the same university and apply for a new program fairly quickly. As such, I am relatively new to the field and appreciate that my first required book was an explanation of how the study of history works and why it should matter.

The Landscape of History is, for all of the ideas and theories that it contains, a fairly easy read, loaded with pop culture examples to illustrate his points and full explanations of the ideas any historians he decides to argue with. It's short, his arguments and points all fit tidily within an outline, and it never feels too dense to tackle. I'm not sure that I agree with all of his comparisons of history to, as he refers to them, "the hard sciences," but I can understand how and why he made those comparisons, which is what counts. This book made for a good introduction to the study of history, and reading it made me feel more confident in my ability to tackle what lies ahead in my studies.

[Reed · Rating 1 out of 5]

or, as I think it should have been called: "I Am A Smart Man So I Must Talk Like A Smart Man So You All Know How I Am A Smart Man Did I Smartly Mention I Am A Smart Man?"

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no overall overriding foundation of truth that determines fairness with objective standards and historians don't have a monopoly on that and 'character' is as relevant as a pretty face for telling history. The author loves character as a certainty and makes history like a science when it is fluid and dependent on the lens looking at the sea of facts with the malleable narrative that is put upon it.

At times, I enjoyed the author's connections to Heisenberg, Picasso, philosophy of science and so on, but he lived in a pretend world with pretend rules and his pretending that self-identity was as constructed as Foucault and Derrida claim was off-putting. The author claims certainty while denying certainty.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. But everything I hate about how Americans think we need to make academic writing more "fun" and "less boring"

[Maya Hartman · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

[Michael Kleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

History and the social sciences are very different academic disciplines, and John Lewis Gaddis, in his book The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2004), explains why. Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University and is best known for his work on the Cold War. In The Landscape of History, he argues that both history and the social sciences are scientific, but what the disciplines are concerned with differs.

In simplistic terms, social scientists are concerned with the future and historians are concerned with the past. Because the social sciences are more speculative in that way, they are more likely to inaccurately carry out their task. The social sciences will almost never be able to predict future events, but historians will be able to describe the past in more or less accurate ways.

The social sciences understand reality by dividing it into parts and use each part to explain the whole. They look for these independent variables and expect to find them out in the world. Natural sciences like geology and astronomy have an ecological worldview that allows them to study how each part effects the whole and how the whole affects the parts. There is no way to separate each variable from the whole and study them as though the variables could exist independently from the whole.

Gaddis argues, in even more simplistic terms, that the reductionist view is exclusive and the ecological view is inclusive. For the social sciences, the reductionist viewpoint allows them to make predictions about future behavior. Future behavior can be predicted because it conforms to rules that have operated in the past, are operating in the present, and can be discovered. These rules are assumed to apply to everyone, everywhere, and to never change over time. Historians, however, don’t concern themselves with future predictions.

Gaddis believes that the social sciences overlook reality in order to preserve their theories about the world. They try to mimic laboratory science by extrapolating variables from the world around them and then using each of these generalizations to explain the whole. Historians, on the other hand, make generalizations and categories in able to better explain events that happened in the past. Gaddis calls this particular generalization.

These are more like tools used for descriptive purposes than rules or laws that reflect a hypothesis. Historians only apply their generalizations to a specific area: the past, and not across all of time and space. Historians create simulations to describe the past. Social scientists create models in order to predict future behavior.

Gaddis accuses the social sciences of being more preoccupied with theory than with reality. The categorization of data that the social sciences engage in removes them from the practical into the methodological, whereas in history categorization serves the very practical purpose of describing events at one place and time in the assumed collective whole of world history.

Is history a science? John Lewis Gaddis argues that, yes, it is, even though it is different from disciplines like psychology, sociology, and political science. I tend to disagree. Although efforts have been made to tie history to hard data and analysis, history is a fundamentally literary pursuit. It involves cherry-picking events in order to tell a story about the past–a process that is completely subjective.

Every generation will have a new way of retelling this story. That is what makes history so rich and interesting, it is constantly changing and being reinterpreted. Never-the-less, The Landscape of History is a must read for anyone looking for a fresh perspective on the subject.

[Nektaria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the first books I'm reading as a history/archaelogy student and it sure was very interesting and easy to read as well! I really appreciated the analogies/references/examples that made Gaddis' thoughts and scientific terms easier to understand!
However, I did find the comparison to social studies to be overly extended to a point past the one needed to clarify the differences between the two sciences, almost as if he was trying to prove that history is "better".

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because, as a geographer, I can't resist anything with the word in the title. In fact Gaddis uses quite a few cartographic and geographic metaphors. The book is full of metaphors. I guess that's his lecturing style. This was originally a series of lectures in Oxford.
I enjoyed his chortling over attempts in the social sciences to be "scientific" and the way he pointed out that the search for independent variables was only really appropriate if you want to make predictions.
His descriptions of history as an iterative process while looking for a good fit reminded me of the endless arguments we had as graduate students over "science" vs "mere description." I always preferred the latter.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wise little meditation on what history is from one of the giants of the field. I particularly liked the critical dissection of the limited and artificial view of science held by many in the field of 'social science'. Instead, Gaddis argues that History as a discipline is methodologically and epistemologically closer to what modern 'hard' sciences try to do, especially fields such as Geology and Astronomy. Around this argument he discusses the historians task, responsibility and sensibility. I came away quite impressed with Gaddis the person, who shows a humanity and openness I had not expected. Worth a quick skim for those who read a lot of history, or one day think about writing it.

[ibrahim elsadony · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب المشهد التاريخى على قصره عظيم فعلا

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is truth? What is objectivity? Can we know anything?

Although the questions may resonate as cliche college bull session talk, there's a reason that they keep coming up, over and over and over again. The pursuit for objective truth has incited doubt, despair, and even severe depression for many over the course of human existence. However terribly the doubt can wreck someone's life, it also provides, on a broad scale, a deeply humanizing element, which is doubt itself.

The objectivity question finds itself at the very root of the conflict between the sciences, philosophy, religion, and history. It gives us affirmation in our progressions and encouragement in our failures. It makes us want to know about us and our surroundings.

Another question then emerges: how do we approach knowing? Is knowledge simply an aggregate of indisputable, universally valid "facts", or is it a mindset, a way of making sense of the uncountable amount of information that exists?

Generally speaking, the latter has been the accepted answer. Knowing, therefore, becomes less of an action and more of a method; a way of turning observation into knowledge, rather than the turning itself. It was this very idea that gave birth to science, "knowledge" in Latin.

In doing so, one of the more remarkable feats in human history has occurred; through the continuation of tensions and distrusts resulting from differences in race, ethnicity, gender, religion and a host of other self-categorizations that continue to plague the world today, the scientific method has and continues to produce a uniform system that has created a sense of trust and reliability that transcends all of these boundaries. Although there have been notable instances of the loss of trust, such as Franz Joseph Gall's highly popular phrenology as well as Hitler's pseudo-scientific promotion of the Aryan race, the scientific method has widely been thought of as one of the great successes spanning not just groups of academic fields, but groups of human civilization.

Although history is a well-respected academic discipline, there is a notable absence of universal methodology. The result has been endless criticism by proponents of the scientific method, who in some cases argue that history's validity must be challenged on the basis that it is the most subjective and least substantiated mainstream subject.

In The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War history professor at Yale, uses a wide array of resources to build on the insights of the most brilliant minds of historical thought and builds inquisitive answers that will likely bring the profession closer to a fuller understanding of the likelihood and benefits of a universally recognizable historical method.

This review's lengthy introduction may seem irrelevant, but objective truth, and the controversies it incites, is a concept that undermines every major point made by Gaddis, every major criticism made by the Cheneyists of the history wars of the early nineties, and every piece of information we take in and regard as either fact or fiction. Even a cursory understanding of objective truth would likely have prevented many Americans from providing their support for a cause which they knew so little about, yet defended so unconditionally.

In understanding what the historian does, Gaddis tells us that one must first have a fundamental understanding of deeper concepts, such as the essence of time, and certain modes of dichotomous thought (eg. legibility vs. privacy, liberation vs. oppression, etc.). The topics of continuity and change, historical causation and his critique on postmodernism and the social sciences are covered with a good blend of traditional knowledge and uniqueness, and are essential for anyone who spends time engaging in historical activity. A chapter is devoted to biography, and the challenges that face that face authors wishing to portray someone with such obvious restraints based in time and space. Gaddis closes the book talking about historical memory, and how history, like a country’s physical landscape, is simultaneously oppressed and liberated.

Gaddis’s criticism of the social sciences is especially noteworthy, in part simply due to the fact that he spends so much time on the subject. He accurately informs us of the numerous shortcomings and antiquation of the methods used by social scientists, and better yet, clearly differentiates the methods of social scientists from historians, and even makes the claim that history is more like certain natural sciences than it is like any social science. Many historians have criticized the methods of social scientists in the past, but very few of them, with the obvious exceptions of E.H. Carr and Marc Bloch, have actually made attempts to form a method. In fact, scientists’ biggest criticism of historians is just that; history has no method, and therefore no standard. Although scientists are correct that history doesn’t have the same neatly drawn out method that science has, they are wrong in their assertion that “anything can be a work of history”. History may not have a method, but it does have standards; one the goals of this book is to ensure that both exist.

Ironically, Gaddis's biggest strength is also his biggest weakness, which is the enormous number of topics, disciplines and issues discussed. Therefore, it is easy to understand one's confusion, even disenchantment, of Landscape due to its low level of follow through with regards to its highly ambitious scope. However, it is this scope that makes this book so important yet at the same time leaves so many unanswered questions. A lot of the topics covered in this book are traditionally associated with history, such as the social sciences, postmodernism, as well as the study of people. On many of the other topics, however, it becomes clear that Gaddis is a historian, and not a physicist, a mathematician, or any other type of academic. One main issue is the limitation of the author’s interdisciplinary knowledge (I’m certainly not doubting his overall knowledge; one doesn’t receive the nickname ‘Dean of Cold War Historians’ for nothing). For a book heavy with interdisciplinary references to nearly every region of the epistemological sphere, Gaddis's insights are similar to those of a high school guidance counselor's knowledge of colleges, in that there is a small amount of knowledge about many things, much like a jack of all trades. In a time dominated by advancement in all forms of academic knowledge, issues such as the passage of time and the use of scale don't seem to be addressed from the perspective of cutting-edge scientific research and philosophical thought, but rather ideas that "fit" into a historical thought process (although there are a few exceptions, one being chaos and complexity theory). Even the number of pages, at a mere 151, gives some sort of inkling to how briefly topics are discussed.

But the beauty of this book is not in it’s failure to develop these astounding ideas; it is in the fact that Gaddis has given the reader a point from which to understand history from a considerably different perspective. As opposed to Rush Limbaugh’s definition of history as “what happened”, we are graced with a highly comprehensive idea of what history is, one that pulls from countless areas of knowledge, however curt these references may be. If one takes away anything from this book, it should be that it is a brief, raw and heavily flawed beginning to what could be the most ambitious achievement in the history of historical writing. The Landscape of History is a start. And it is, without a doubt, a very good start.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Again there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror... do fractals then give us scientific basis for characterizing character? I wouldn't want to push the argument that far. Our 'measurements' of this quality will never be as precise, or as replicable, as the ones scientists can now make of drainage patterns, mountain slopes, blood vessels, stalks of cauliflower, and of course the British coastline. What fractals do suggest, though, is something we don't often hear about biography: that it transcends the familiar dimensions of time and space to deal with scale as well." This book rang all the nerd bells in my head: history, fractals, how time and space fit together, and of course, truth and reality. There's so much delightful divergent thinking about how to approach the problem of "writing history" --- and, interesting to see the author's perspective of this in a very different time and place than we live in now. This was published 2002 and I can't hep but wonder which pieces of this would be different if it were to be written today. There are parts of it that feel so...well, 2002, when we perhaps believed that the 'fractal geometry of terror' was a thing of the past and not potentially staring us right the face. A brain shaker book for sure.

[Enrique · Rating 1 out of 5]

Encontré el libro de casualidad en una librería de segunda mano. Pensé que sería interesante.

Lo que encontré en él es cuanto menos anti-filosófico, empezando por la singularización de los términos "pasado" y "futuro", no como proyecciones de la conciencia humana y su elaboración cultural (memoria o recuerdo y horizonte de expectativa), sino como objetos metafísicos con agencia propia.

El uso de las metáforas si no es ridículo, cuanto menos es ineficaz. Carecen de gracia y son poco sugerentes. Pretende revestir de profundidad su discurso cuando no deja de emplear lugares comunes. Como referencias pop están bien, pero no en un libro académico que carece de elegancia y finneza. Problema del autor, no de las imágenes que emplea. Lo cual señala que, o no se las cree, o su imaginación es prácticamente estéril.

Lo último es la triste analogía que intenta establecer con otros campos, en especial, las ciencias "puras". Pues con ello evidencia que a nivel historiográfico, más allá de los dos autores de cabecera que cita -Bloch y Carr-, está desconectado de cualquier corriente historiográfica -y de su evolución en el caso de Annales- y de las aportaciones que otras disciplinas han hecho a la Historia. Especialmente lamentable es que emplee conceptos de las ciencias puras para explicar aspectos que ya tienen sus propios conceptos históricos.

En definitiva, si no lo lees puedes dedicar ese tiempo a una lectura más edificante.

[Jay French · Rating 2 out of 5]

A historian analogizes the practice of writing history. It’s like making a map, where the mapmaker gets to decide what to feature, and how to measure, and level of detail. Later, it’s like something else. I found this interesting for a bit, but found the intellectual navel gazing, while very well written in non-academic prose, still couldn’t hold my interest beyond the first change of analogy. The style of writing was interesting enough that I would look for other books by this author on actual histories. Truly what drew me in was the cover - the take on Friedrich's Wanderer. The author makes some interesting analogies about how historians view their subjects, so you only see their backs.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a somewhat interesting look into the craft of how to write about history. Ok that is not a great description - it focuses more on how to think about how to write history. Honestly, it was a difficult book for me to get through and that was disappointing because I really enjoyed the last Gaddis book I read called On Grand Strategy. Gaddis is a deep thinker, but I felt he was repetitive and not all that engaging with his arguments. There were parts here and there that I enjoyed, but I think this book as an hour lecture would have been fascinating. Anyway, not my best review, which kind of sums up my experience with this particular read.

[Annalisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas about creating history but as a non historian it was at times quite dull. I did enjoy the metaphors.