The Landscape of History Quotes

“Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even as you're diminished by it. You're suspended between sensibilities that are at odds with one another, but it's precisely within that suspension that your own identity--whether as a person or a historian--tends to reside. Self-doubt must always precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again.
. . .
It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1940, arranged not by dates but in terms of ascending horror. Start with the parrot he kept in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The dictator had the habit of pacing up and down for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. He immediately reached into the cage with his pipe and crushed the parrot's head. A very micro-level event, you might well say, so what?

But then you learn that Stalin, while on vacation in the Crimea, was once kept awake by a barking dog. It turned out to be a seeing-eye dog that belonged to a blind peasant. The dog wound up being shot, and the peasant wound up in the Gulag. And then you learn that Stalin drove his independently minded second wife, who tried to talk back to him, into committing suicide. And that he arranged for Trotsky, who also talked back, to be assassinated halfway around the world. And that he arranged as well the deaths of as many of Trotsky's associates that he could reach, as well as the deaths of hundred of thousands of other people who never had anything to do with Trotsky. And that when his own people began to talk back by resisting the collectivization of agriculture, he allowed some fourteen million of them to die from the resulting starvation, exile, or imprisonment.

Again, there's self-similarity across scale, except that the scale this time is a body count. It's a fractal geometry of terror. Stalin's character extended across time and space, to be sure, but what's most striking about it is its extension across scale: the fact that his behavior seemed much the same in large matters, small matters, and most of those that lay in between.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected, enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It gave rise to a secular consciousness that, for better or for worse, placed the responsibility for what happens in history squarely on the people who live through history”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“Learning about the past liberates the learner from oppressions earlier constructions of the past have imposed upon them.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“[A]lthough the past is never completely knowable, it is more knowable than the future.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“Common sense is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“Finally, when historians contest interpretations of the past among themselves, they’re liberating it in yet another sense: from the possibility that there can be only a single valid explanation of what happened.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“The issue for historians , then, is not whether we should make moral judgments, but how we can do so responsibly, by which I mean in such a way as to convince both the professionals and non-professionals who'll read our work that what we say makes sense.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“[H]istory is arguably the best method of enlarging experience in such a way as to command the widest possible consensus on what the significance of that experience might be,”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“to depict reality - that is as much an artistic vision as a scientific sensibility”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“So is history a science? I put the question to a group of Yale seniors recently, and the answer one of them came up with made perfect sense to me: it was that we should instead concentrate on determining which sciences are historical. The distinction would lie along the line separating actual replicability as the standard for verification--the rerunning of experiments in a laboratory--from the virtual replicability that's associated with thought experiments. And it would be the accessibility versus the inaccessibility of processes that would make the difference.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“We know the future only by the past we project into it.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past