"Will... never allow either the reader of history or the writer of it to think about the past in quite
the same way as before."
--The New York Times
"A masterful statement on the historical method.... Gaddis' characterization of the social sciences will surely
spark debate even as it illuminates important intellectual connections between the disciplines. Delightfully readable,
the book is a grand celebration of the pursuit of knowledge."
--Foreign Affairs
Publisher Web Site, June, 2004
Summary
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. John Lewis 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.