Just finished reading The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis. The book, written for the layman and historian alike, outlines Gaddis’ views on what history is and the problems and debates of its legitimacy. I loved the allusions to modern films and coining of catchy phrases like “the Malkovich test,” in reference to the Spike Jonze film Being John Malkovich; the test is when biographers thrust themselves into their subject’s head to make sure they are representing the perceptions of their subject and not themselves. However, being too involved in the subject the biographer would lack analytical depth so therefore must get dumped out alongside the New Jersey Turnpike.
I also loved the continuous discussion on Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog.
As Gaddis states, “The impression it leaves is contradictory, suggesting at once mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of an individual within it. We see no face, so it’s impossible to know whether the prospect confronting the young man is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both.” More important to the historical discussion, is the Wanderer looking into the past or the future? A landscape he knows is beneath the mysterious fog and mist or a blinded future that the Wanderer, back turned to the viewer, is forwardly facing? The grand perspective of the landscape that the Wanderer knows is there despite the mist is an interesting allusion to the study of perspective in history where the past is imagined much in the same way.
The Chapters:
The Landscape of History; Time and Space; Structure and Process; The Interdependency of Variables; Chaos and Complexity; Causation Contingency, and Counterfactuals; Molecules with Minds of their Own, Seeing Like a Historian.
From: Oxford Press
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.
