Landscape Of History

Superior Essays
Amber Ramos
History 1000C
Prof. Wang
5 December 2015

The Landscape of History How Historians Map The Past

The novel The Landscape of History How Historians Map The Past by John Lewis Gaddis touches on subjects such as the idea of history and how historians assume things and about what’s to come in the future. He describes how the only reason that we know things about the future is because of learning from the past historical events. He describes the fact that we can only learn from the past events but we cannot actually go back and relive them but only represent these past events. Not only does Gaddis realize this about history he realizes how science, history, and art have something in common that they depend on the recognition of
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Historians have to base their knowledge on things that happened in the past that they didn’t experience first hand, which can be a difficult task. History and science can be related in many ways but may also contradict themselves. Scientific experiments require closely and very particular results, as do historic events. Historians and scientists both have to deal with evidence that may contradict what they have to say or think that happened. Historians and scientist must both use logic and imagination to get their final results and story about the past events. They need to use their own knowledge as well as information they learned about. Historians and scientists do differ because unlike historians scientists have equations and graphs to help them figure out solutions rather than mostly just their own knowledge. Historians made a distinction between a reductionist and an ecological view of reality, by breaking it up into many different parts. Reductionism describes how components interact. The ecological view of reality is inclusive. Historians acknowledge patterns because that is what makes up history and its events; each event leads up to the

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