The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past - Paperback

$19.98
$19.98
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The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
  • The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past - Paperback

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past - Paperback

by John Lewis Gaddis
$19.98
$19.98

Book Overview

by John Lewis Gaddis (Author)

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.

Author Biography

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. A leading authority on Cold War history, his books include We Now Know, The Long Peace, and Strategies of Containment. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Number of Pages: 208
Dimensions: 0.5 x 5.3 x 7.9 IN
Illustrated: Yes
Publication Date: April 08, 2004
ISBN9780195171570
Author John Lewis Gaddis
PublisherOxford University Press
GenreHistory
FormatPaperback
PublishedApril 2004
LanguageENG- English
Pages208
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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History Nonfiction

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About John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, and was the founding director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, biography, and historical methodology. He has won two undergraduate teaching awards at Yale and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His George F. Kennan: An American Life won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

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