The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

by John Lewis Gaddis

Historians too often retreat in confusion when social scientists reproach them for not using equations, graphs, matrices, and the other methods of formal modeling to represent the past. We’re not being “scientific,” we’re told, when we subvert generalizations, resist ranking causes, and reject the use of discipline-specific jargon. We might well respond, though, by asking: what are zoologists and botanists doing when they seek out distinctive species? Or: how would an astronomer rank the causes that produced the solar system, or the earth’s position within it? Or: why do so many “hard” scientists write so much better than most social scientists—and have so many more readers?41 Such responses might not satisfy our critics. But they would certainly boost our morale.