'The Landscape of History': Learning From the Natural Sciences nytimes.com
[ review of THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY How Historians Map the Past. By John Lewis Gaddis. Excerpt: ]
A better prototype for the way historians work, Gaddis argues, is those natural sciences that themselves attempt to explain great historical processes (the creation of the universe, the evolution of species, the shaping and reshaping of the natural world). ''These disciplines work,'' he says, not by imposing theories on events, but ''by deriving processes from structures, by fitting representations to realities, by privileging neither induction nor deduction, by remaining open . . . to what insights from one field can tell you about another.'' Historians have paid too little attention to these nonlaboratory natural sciences, Gaddis writes, but there are many unacknowledged similarities between the way they do their work and the way historians do theirs, and much that each can learn from the other.
Most of this book is less polemical than these central arguments make it sound. Gaddis offers a painstaking explanation of the way historians reach conclusions, the way they test their assumptions, the way they constantly revise their explanations. ''It's part of historical consciousness,'' he says, in an implicit rebuttal to conservative critics of historical revisionism, ''to learn . . . that there is no 'correct' interpretation of the past.'' |
