Perris – Reaction Essay

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#01

2009
Christina Alanne Perris

John Lewis Gaddis’s Claremont Graduate University

9/7/2009

The Landscape of
History: How
Historians Map the
Past
Reaction Essay #-01 for HIST 300 – The
Study of History
This short paper (500 words) explores the historical methodology,
arguments and evidence presented and advanced by historian John Lewis
Gaddis in his groundbreaking work The Landscape of History: How Historians
Map the Past.
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In his work The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past John

Lewis Gaddis presents the conception of history as a science, a notion not

new to the field but approached here in a unique manner. Instead of

marrying the field to the social sciences as is often instinctually done, Gaddis

breaks away from this conceptualization of history and instead compares the

field to the “hard sciences”, a realm from which it has been excluded due to

its subjective nature. Unlike biology or chemistry history has no definitive

laws which govern how events are supposed to unfold, a fault Gaddis

attributes to the “human factor” involved, nor does it offer the opportunity

for the event to be repeated, a fault Gaddis attributes mockingly to the fact

we have yet to realize the possibility of time travel.

The rise of evolutionary biology and the fast-paced advancement of

scientific knowledge in the early twentieth century, two key points

acknowledged by historians E.H. Carr and Marc Bloch as being significant,

allowed for science to embrace a “new” way of thinking, which was deriving

structure from process rather than the more “scientific” way of deriving

process from structure; however, this new approach was not an invention of

scientists. This process is something historians had been actively engaging

in for decades before its “discovery” by these new scientists. In the case of

historians, history is the narrative representation, or the structure, of a

reality that has moved into the past, which is the process. Gaddis, along

with his predecessors Bloch and Carr, eloquently pay homage to the origins
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of this shift by explaining that it is not historians becoming more scientific in

their thinking; rather, it is scientists beginning to think historically.

The historian, as Gaddis quickly points out and substantiates with the

works of his aforementioned predecessors, utilizes many of the skills

employed by the new scientist, with the most crucial to the history being the

use of “thought experiments”. Historians, just like the new scientists of

evolutionary biology, dwell in a field where the reproducibility of

phenomenon is impossible; therefore, they must rely on these virtual

replications, worked out in their minds, to reconstruct events of the past.

These reconstructions are built utilizing the information available to the

historian and their structure is regulated by logic and reasonable plausibility

of the scenario given the known facts surrounding the event. It is this last

point, that the narrative becomes a representation which best fits reality,

that Gaddis argues is essential for the historian to accomplish, whether they

are writing a biography on a historic figure or recounting a battle.