ISBN10: 0195171578, ISBN13: 9780195171570, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Softcover Paperback. 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 pointsout 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 theycan 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 isone 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 anengaging introduction to the ...
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ISBN10: 0195171578, ISBN13: 9780195171570, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Softcover Paperback. 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 pointsout 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 theycan 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 isone 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 anengaging introduction to the ...
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New York |Oxford OUP USA 2004 Trade paperback New in new dust jacket.

ISBN10: 0195171578, ISBN13: 9780195171570, [publisher: OUP USA 2004-04-08, New York |Oxford] Softcover Language: ENG
[London, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 2004]