Review Of John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape Of History

One of the best ways to understand something is to explain it. Explaining a process, idea, or even a construct will help people comprehend them. In The Landscape of History, author John Lewis Gaddis seeks to explain the approaches historians take in their field. He argues that while historical methodologies are complex, they are not hard to understand and ultimately wind up serving a greater purpose. To make historical methodologies understandable, Gaddis makes use of comparisons to other fields, contends that a historian’s techniques are not comparable to those used by social scientists, and explains the purpose of such techniques. Gaddis’ work is able showcase what historians do and why they do it, but he is clearly bias when making his argument.

One of the first comparisons he uses is the comparison of cartographers. He states, “the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it” (Gaddis, 33). Therefore, just as cartographers look at geographic landscapes and make maps based off of them, historians look at the landscape of the past and make histories based off of them. He also explains that both cartographers and historians distill their works. What he means by this is if both would reconstruct every single detail in their works they would not be representations and would instead be replications. Gaddis also compares historians to scientists from some of the hard sciences like astronomy, geology, and paleontology. He contends that these sciences depend on thought experiments like historians, and that they use thought experiments to try and find evidence that will explain remnants of the past that they work with. Hard scientists look for evidence in the past that will explain physical objects like rocks and bones, just like historians looks for evidence to explain documents and artifacts. Gaddis states “historians too start with surviving structures…they then deduce the processes that produced them (Gaddis, 41). But if historians are like cartographers and hard scientists, then what are they not

The first, is that it appears he wanted to attack the social sciences. In his discussion on why historical methods are not comparable to social science methods he includes his opinion that when historians make recommendations for the future they are more likely to get them right than social scientists. He also states that when social scientists get something right they are usually verifying the obvious. The book could be improved with the omission of opinions like these. The second bias is that he wanted the field of history to gain more notoriety by comparing it to scientific methods. Scientific methods are often regarded as being able to find the truth to a high degree, and by comparing the methods of historians to them it appears Gaddis wanted to give validity to their