Summary Of John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape Of History

John Lewis Gaddis’ The Landscape of History is part of a long tradition of prominent historians publishing a book defining the nature and problems of the discipline. It’s a tradition because historians are still trying to figure out exactly what it is that they do and how to do it. They put in for consideration an accumulation of their wisdom and anecdotes and hope that this amounts to a conclusion about the nature of history, (some do it well, such as R.J. Evans’ In Defense of History, and some do it badly). But the discipline of history has never found its bedrock, its fundamental principles. The effort to define its practice has been sort of like the hammer-andbell game at an old time fair: anyone can step up, swing the hammer, and try

He is enthusiastic about the nature of history and its problems, and his well intentioned disposition are everywhere visible in the book. It is hard not to like Mr. Gaddis for his good faith and honesty, but in the end, I did not get much more out of the book than that. The first thing Gaddis needs to be rebuked for was his insatiable deployment of metaphor, often for things that are easily described and understood without metaphor; this was terribly distracting and held up the flow of ideas rather than helped. What this taught me about history was to avoid confusing eloquence with metaphor, or that explaining complex ideas to the layperson does not require a puppet show. This was compounded by his obsession with deploying one or all of the trifecta of Hitler, Stalin and Mao every time he needed an example of evil and/or tyranny in history. Finally, Gaddis lurched towards his conclusion with the disastrous 2 habit of likening historiographic considerations to the plots of recent films, the films themselves also becoming a

He suggests that principles of repeatability, prediction and quantification (he does not mention the isolation of variables) exist in the historical discipline the same way they exist in the hard sciences. When these principles don’t fit history at all, he makes a strange distinction between Newtonian “methods” and modern, (one supposes), Quantum “methods.” I’m not sure what he means by that, except that he thinks experiment has been supplanted by the theoretical mathematics and educated speculation of wormhole theories and time travel models. But of course, it hasn’t – experiment is the cornerstone of science and it is the reason science is so incredibly productive, reliable, and limited in the phenomena it can explain. Gaddis goes further – he argues the search for key variables as somehow antiquated, even though this continues to be the stock in trade of the sciences, but can’t do much of a job of articulating what it is the notion of “interdependent variables”