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The Landscape of History

How Historians Map the Past

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The Landscape of History

Written by: John Lewis Gaddis
Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
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About this listen

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.

©2002 John Lewis Gaddis (P)2017 Tantor
Social Sciences United States World Witty
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What the critics say

"A bold and challenging book, unafraid of inviting controversy. It provides a strong statement for our time of both the limits and the value of the historical enterprise." ( New York Times)

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