In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with the scholarly world awash in new theories challenging the very idea of truth, faith in the scientific character of historical study has been much more difficult to sustain.
The almost simultaneous birth of the modern idea of ''social science'' contributed additional tools to the historical enterprise and reinforced the growing belief that history could take its place alongside the laboratory sciences as an objective search for truth. The modern historical profession owes its birth, to a large degree, to the belief among late-19th-century historians - most notably the great German scholar Leopold von Ranke - that new scientific methods could liberate the study of history from opinion and prejudice, and put scholarship squarely on a foundation of unimpeachable fact. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.Is the study of history a science? Can it become one? These questions have divided historians for over a century. 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-modernistĬlaims that we can't know anything at all about the past. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. 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. Systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static
Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. In doing so, they combine the techniques ofĪrtists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
