The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

John Lewis Gaddis

Jun 2017 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Jack Chekijian

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. His books include The Cold War: A New History, George F. Kennan: An American Life, and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.

Jack Chekijian has narrated and produced over five hundred hours of audio in his first five years as a full-time narrator of audiobooks. He was designated an Audible Approved Producer in January 2013, and he enjoys narrating nonfiction as well as exploring new approaches with the classics.