The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the PastOxford University Press, 2002 M11 14 - 208 páginas 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. |
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... there be that much new to say? I rather doubted it. So in the end, I settled on something completely different: a set of lectures, delivered as before in the Examination Schools building on High Street, on the admittedly ambitious ...
... there be that much new to say? I rather doubted it. So in the end, I settled on something completely different: a set of lectures, delivered as before in the Examination Schools building on High Street, on the admittedly ambitious ...
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... there ; the students , faculty , and friends who attended my lectures , and who provided so many insightful comments on them in the question period afterwards ; my indefatigable Yale research assistant Ryan Floyd ; and , finally ...
... there ; the students , faculty , and friends who attended my lectures , and who provided so many insightful comments on them in the question period afterwards ; my indefatigable Yale research assistant Ryan Floyd ; and , finally ...
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... there to see for sure. Science fiction, of course, has invented time machines. Indeed two recent novels, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book and Michael Crichton's Timelines, feature graduate students in history at, respec- tively, Oxford and ...
... there to see for sure. Science fiction, of course, has invented time machines. Indeed two recent novels, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book and Michael Crichton's Timelines, feature graduate students in history at, respec- tively, Oxford and ...
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... there's a larger point lurking here : it is that the direct experience of events isn't necessarily the best path ... there on earth the min- gling lines of Picasso , coming and going , developing and destroying themselves . " What was ...
... there's a larger point lurking here : it is that the direct experience of events isn't necessarily the best path ... there on earth the min- gling lines of Picasso , coming and going , developing and destroying themselves . " What was ...
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... there's a paradox , for although the discovery of geologic or " deep " time diminished the significance of human beings in the overall history of the universe , it also , in the eyes of Charles Darwin , T. H. Huxley , Mark Twain , and ...
... there's a paradox , for although the discovery of geologic or " deep " time diminished the significance of human beings in the overall history of the universe , it also , in the eyes of Charles Darwin , T. H. Huxley , Mark Twain , and ...
Contenido
1 | |
17 | |
Structure and Process | 35 |
The Interdependency of Variables | 53 |
Chaos and Complexity | 71 |
Causation Contingency and Counterfactuals | 91 |
Molecules with Minds of Their Own | 111 |
Seeing Like a Historian | 129 |
Notes | 153 |
Index | 183 |
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Adams Appleby behavior biography Bloch and Carr causation causes chaos and complexity Chapter coastline Cold War COLL consensus Counterfactuals Defence of History Designing Social Inquiry E. H. Carr Elman evolutionary example experience explain forecasting fractal future happened Historian's Craft historians historical consciousness History and Theory History New York human Idea of History independent variables International Relations John Lewis Gaddis John Ziman Keohane liberation Logic of Historical London Marc Bloch Margaret Jacob McNeill means metaphor method narrative Niall Ferguson oppression Oxford University Press paleontologists particular past patterns phenomena physical Political Science predictable Princeton problem Process Tracing punctuated equilibrium R. G. Collingwood Rational Choice Theory reality reductionism representation scientific seek sense sensitive dependence social sciences social scientists space Stephen Jay Gould structures suggests surviving Theory 38 December there’s things tion trans Truth about History Virtual History Waldrop what’s writing Yale