Preface
1: "The Landscape of History"
2: "Time and Space"
3: "Structure and Process"
4: "The Interdependency of Variables"
5: "Chaos and Complexity"
6: "Causation, Contingency, and Counterfactuals"
7: "Molecules with Minds of Their Own"
8: "Seeing Like a Historian"
Notes
Index
John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. A leading authority on Cold War history, his books include We Now Know, The Long Peace, and Strategies of Containment. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
"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
"A bold and challenging book, unafraid of inviting controversy. It
provides a strong statement for our time of both the limits and the
value of the historical enterprise."--The New York Times Book
Review
"A real tour de force: a delight to read, and a light-hearted
celebration of the odd, 'fractal' patterns that intellectual and
other forms of human and natural history exhibit."--William H.
McNeill
"Turns the old argument over science and history upside down."--The
Washington Post Book World
"Never before have I come across a book that so illuminated the
craft of the historian."--Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
"This is another of those books that rewards the effort it
requires. Besides providing invaluable insights into how the
historian goes about his business, it teaches--like all really good
books--of life beyond its boundaries."--Colin Walters, Washington
Times
"These engaging and accessible lectures describe why history
matters. Non-historians who want to learn more about the field will
find the book illuminating, and historians will learn from the
tools provided."--The San Francisco Chronicle
"A masterful statement on the historical method by a distinguished
Cold War historian.... Gaddis' most provocative claim is a powerful
irony: Social science, with its independent variables and deductive
theories, would appear to have more scientific pretensions than
does history. But the historical method, which relies on thought
experiments and the interplay of inductive and deductive reasoning,
more fully shares the methodical logic of such fields as
astronomy, paleontology, and evolutionary biology. 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
"A bold and challenging book, unafraid of inviting controversy. It
provides a strong statement for our time of both the limits and the
value of the historical enterprise."--Alan Brinkley, New York Times
Book Review
"Never before have I come across a book that so illuminated the
craft of the historian.... Gaddis has a delightful command of
language--and a delight in it. He draws on Gertrude Stein, Mark
Twain, contemporary movies, Thucydides, Tom Stoppard, Woody Allen
and lots more.... He is a distinguished scholar who writes with a
clarity and a lack of pedantry that is quite marvelous. Equally
impressive, he's not afraid of a rip-roaring fight with his
fellow
academics."--Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun
"In 'The Landscape of History,' Mr. Gaddis, the author of several
distinguished books on the cold war, both pays homage to Bloch (and
with more conditional admiration, to the British historian E.H.
Carr) and addresses the challenge of postmodernism. He does all of
this in an urbane and eloquent little volume that, in its way,
might even be what Bloch himself would have written had he
lived.... Mr. Gaddis's learned and graceful reflections on all of
these
questions are deeply humane, propelled by the conviction that only
by sustaining a historical consciousness can we know where we
should want to go. They will also never allow either the reader of
history
or the writer of it to think about the past in quite the same way
as before."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times
"This is another of those books that rewards the effort it
requires. Besides providing invaluable insights into how the
historian goes about his business, it teaches--like all really good
books--of life beyond its boundaries."--Colin Walters, Washington
Times
"A technical but provocative inquiry for sophisticated history
readers."--Booklist
"Entertaining, masterful disquisition on the aims, limitations,
design, and methods of historiography.... Employing a wide range of
metaphors (from Cleopatra's nose to Napoleon's underwear),
displaying an extensive knowledge of current thinking in
mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology, alluding frequently
to figures as disparate as Lee Harvey Oswald, Gwyneth Paltrow, John
Lennon, and John Malkovich, Gaddis guides us on a genial trip into
the historical
method and the imagination that informs it.... Provocative,
polymathic, and pleasurable."--Kirkus Reviews
"The Landscape of History explores recent, surprising convergences
of natural science and human history and does so with clarity,
charm and easy erudition. Gaddis's book is a real tour de force: a
delight to read, and a light-hearted celebration of the odd,
'fractal' patterns that intellectual and other forms of human and
natural history exhibit."--William H. McNeill
"This is an extraordinary book-- a tour de force-- which is
profound and subtle and at the same time a joy to read. I have
recommended it to several friends in and out of academia, and they
have universally come back to me with thanks and high praise for
it." --James E. Crisp, North Carolina State University
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