000			a
999			_c29857 _d29857
008			191209b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780195171570
082			_a900 _bGAD
100			_aGaddis, John Lewis
245			_a Landscape of history : how historians map the past
260			_bOxford University Press _c2004 _aNew York
300			_axii, 192 p. _bill. _c21 cm
365			_b15.95 _c75.10 _dUSD
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520			_aWhat 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.
650			_aHistoriography
650			_aAesthetics
650			_aPhilosophy
942			_2ddc _cBK