Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
2
#01
2009
Christina Alanne Perris
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.
Perris – Reaction Essay
3
#01
In his work The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past John
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
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
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
in for decades before its “discovery” by these new scientists. In the case of
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
Perris – Reaction Essay
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#01
The historian, as Gaddis quickly points out and substantiates with the
employed by the new scientist, with the most crucial to the history being the
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