| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. By John Lewis Gaddis. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 192 pp. $23.00, ISBN 0-19-506652-9.)
In The Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis, like Henry Adams a century before him, engages large questions about what it is that historians do and what it means to be scientific. This important book, written with grace, clarity, and wit, is sure to become a classic in the field of methodology.	1
Gaddis contends that the methods employed by historians and some scientists are now closer than they have been in a century—closer even than social scientific methods are to those of the hard sciences. It is not that historians have inched closer to the laboratory, but instead that slowly since Charles Darwin's time "scientists had begun to derive structures from processes: they had, in short, brought history into science," which marked a "shift from a static to an evolutionary view" (p. 39). Further, science works by metaphors, such as "the behavior of an electron is 'like' the vibration of air in a spherical container" (p. 2). This dependence on metaphor and the recognition of patterns is another way that science and history are similar.	. . .

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