Category: Week 6, The Landscape of History, Part II

Reflection by Caly McCarthy

I found Gaddis’ commentary on history as a tool of liberation to be the most significant part of his concluding chapter.  I find it compelling because it offers a “so what?” to the entire discipline of history.  Certainly history is interesting, but is it meaningful beyond the ivory tower?  According to Gaddis, it most definitely can be.

History is not a list of names and dates.  It is not merely chronology.  It often examines causality and implications – certainly more relevant, but significant?  I think that history is a powerful tool to challenge oppression, both subtle and overt.  When leaders harken back to a rosier past, historians have the capacity to break apart monoliths and represent a more nuanced understanding, speaking up for those who did not enjoy the projected past experience.  When those in power legitimize their harmful actions with the logic that “it’s always been this way,” historians can demonstrate that very little has “always been.”  This observation opens up space for different expressions of gender, beauty, family life, leadership styles, economic systems, etc.

Perhaps Gaddis says it best when he quips that “the sources of oppression are lodged in time and are not independent of time” (146).  Unlike the molecules that natural scientists are inclined to study, humans do not act in predictable manners.  Although this is frustrating to social scientists who seek clear causation to aid predictive models, this should be understood as a sign of hope; humans have the capacity change, and historians have the ability to help them recognize that.

In Gaddis’ chapter, “Seeing like a Historian”, Gaddis brings up the interesting question of representation. He talks about how historians’ own perspective and how they can alter the history. The most interesting part that I took from the reading was the discussion of whether freedom could exist without oppression. This really made me think about it in a way I never thought. I always thought of those items as different entities, but without each other what would the other even be. That is when seeing as a historian comes into play. For me I take events and make a conclusion based on common thoughts about that event. But what I must transform into is taking an event and understanding that many different actions can lead to an event and there might be many answers not just one overarching conclusion that makes looking at a certain event easy. This is how the freedom and oppression come into play. It is easy to say you know what freedom is but when you really think about freedom is what we think it is because we are all we have to base it off of. We must look at the different levels of freedom and not just ask do you have freedom or not.

In Gaddis’ final chapter, “Seeing Like a Historian” he proposes that the historian plays the role of “oppressor” when writing history and that the historians biggest fear is the resurrection of their historical subjects from the dead and their critique of the Historians interpretation of their reality; is to me, an interesting concept and an important one. In class we have spoken about the role of presentism in historical analysis and how modern ideas and perspectives can be carried over by an author into their interpretation of the past and distort it. Gaddis maintains that this process is not always purposeful but rather inevitable and a part of human nature. He goes on to say that history is only a representation of reality much in the same way a map is only a representation of geography and that over time these representations become reality. Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities explore this concept on a grander scale by showing how the modern emergence of the nation state led to the concept of nationalism and Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, a nation is an imagined community because it is socially constructed by people living and participating in a society who perceive themselves as part of a homogeneous group different from that of other human beings although they have no personal bond and face-to-face communication with other members of their society in order to maintain the function of said society – the perceived boundaries between them and other nations are largely illusory. This process of representations becoming reality and the creation of constructed memories, as Gaddis put it, are the way humans come to terms with and cope with the past. Furthermore, these constructed memories can also serve a positive function. “We liberate the ones that have from their self-proclaimed grandiosity: we try not to confuse how they wanted to be seen with who they actually were. And we try to free those who left no monuments from the resulting silences, whether imposed upon them by others, or by themselves” (140). The duality of historian as oppressor and liberator and the largely unconscious process behind it is an important thought to keep in mind when interpreting the historical work of ourselves and others as well as the reality of everyday life.

Reading Gaddis’ text, in a way, helped get me thinking in different ways about how history and its methods work. For me, the most interesting part of the text was the distinction between types of causes in the sixth chapter, because it helped expand my view of causation.

Where previously I wouldn’t have even considered the impact that the formation of the Japanese islands had on the attack on Pearl Harbor, thanks to Gaddis it know seems obvious to me that the attack couldn’t have happened without the islands forming. Usually, I would only look at the most recent thing or things that preceded an event as possible causes, but know I realize that things that happened long before are also causes—just slightly less relevant ones.

I was also very interested by exceptional and general causes, and the idea of context’s effect on consequences. I guess it isn’t so much that it was news to me, but that it highlighted something I had often glossed over. The same conditions, for example, that cause car accidents exist very often without causing car accidents. But with the addition of one other, new cause, an accident can occur.

I think this recognition of varying levels of causes is important to the way we see history because it can help us choose which causes to highlight. Not only that, but it gives more options of causes to highlight. With all of these different things to focus on, there are any number of ways to interpret history, and with that, more chances to get closer to the truth

While Gaddis makes several points in his concluding chapter, a part I found interesting was how Gaddis summed up history as a tension of opposites. He furthers this point later in the chapter by mentioning how freedom cannot exist unless it is compared alongside oppression. It is an interesting concept, as most, if not all, of our ideas and expected social norms are defined by what they are not. The same goes for historical narratives, and it is important to remember narratives are constructed retellings, but they mean nothing if they have no comparison or background. However, I would be lying to claim I understood this entire chapter to its fullest extent. The chapter seemed a bit convoluted, and I struggled to follow all of his arguments. Many of them seemed circular, and I do not fully grasp his oppressor/oppressed argument enough to create a valid analyzation. I certainly attempted, although it was a thinly veiled garbage, so I deleted it and fully admit that my understanding of the conclusion is considerably weaker than the rest of the text.

However, the title of the last chapter, “Seeing Like a Historian,” does cause me to reflect on several of his major themes. For one, historical narratives are reconstructions of the past, created by interpretations of evidence, although it is impossible to completely recreate events. In order to be a historian, one must recognize and even embrace these limitations. Additionally, Gaddis stresses throughout the book that history is multi-causal, and an individual is not thinking like a historian if they attempt to locate a independent variable. Thus, history is not linear, and Gaddis leaves the work of attempting to predict the future to social scientists, as historians recognize the futility of these actions. Throughout the novel, Gaddis compares history to the natural sciences, and draws interesting parallels, as history is just as methodological as the sciences. Lastly, a vital skill of seeing like a historian is the ability to recreate historical possibilities in their mind, much like how experiments are performed in laboratories. While these ideas are not all encompassing, they are important aspects in thinking as a historian, and are necessary while creating history.

In The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, author John Lewis Gaddis explains the many ways to effectively interpret history, while presenting a critique of past methods. By taking his audience through the relationship between the studies of art, science, and history, Gaddis is able to expand on the importance of an effective historical method. Historical landscapes are then discussed when Gaddis refers to historical consciousness and states that historians must adventure into the future while reflecting on the past. Gaddis then explains the negative and positive aspects of his method of interpreting history. He believes that historians must do their best to look into the past because it is unattainable: historians cannot physically travel back in time to any event or period in history. Gaddis makes it clear that in order to see like a historian, historians must be able analyze multiple events in history through different time periods in order to draw conclusions.

The most interesting part of Gaddis’ text on seeing like an historian in The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past is the way that the author uses a comparison between the social sciences and historical methodology to reflect on what it means to be a historian. By using this comparison, I am able to understand his historical method from a different perspective. Gaddis puts emphasis on seeing like a historian in order to encourage his audience to reflect on their own work as historians. Throughout the text, Gaddis also gives many definitions of what it means to be an effective historian, which I found extremely insightful. These two important parts of the text encouraged me to reflect on the methods I use when researching a new topic or event. With my reflection, I realized that it is extremely important to research not only my topic or event but the time period that they are associated with. I also realized that by separating my personal opinion or bias from my historical research, my research will be much more accurate.

John Lewis Gaddis’ The Landscape of History reads like a vindication of the discipline itself, a retort to the arrogance of other academic pursuits that deride historical research for its lack of definitive methodology. Gaddis’s defense is most interesting when he compares the methodology of the disciplines across subject matter. His scathing review of the social sciences posits that these disciplines suffered from methodological fallacies that consequently discredit many of their conclusions. Social sciences aim for the scientific research ideals of an earlier era, when the discovery of set natural laws were the ultimate goal. Consequently, the social sciences use reductionist methods to isolate independent variables and draw definitive causal conclusions. The prioritization of theory over reality therefore distances their representations from what actually occurs in real life. In contrast, the modern hard sciences have embraced a new understanding of chaos and complex reality, analyzing rather than obscuring when data does not fit into neat parameters. For Gaddis, the virtual laboratory of non-replicable hard sciences is most similar to the methodologies of historical research; the generalization of particular realities found in the social science therefore serves as a foil to Gaddis’ discipline.

I found these comparisons particularly insightful because my own academic experiences allowed me to draw comparisons between the disciplines. At a liberal arts college like Dickinson, almost all students come into contact with a variety of discipline-specific practices; as someone who almost majored in political science, Gaddis’ scathing review of this department’s methodology was useful for understanding the differences between these two very separate academic worlds. While I had previously thought of my political science courses as perhaps most similar to my history courses, I now see new parallels between history and the classes I took in the environmental science department. As Gaddis points out, the non-replicable representations of complex, multicausal worlds is true of both subjects, despite their very different topics.

Hello everyone,

For this week, we have continued to read Gaddis’ intriguing discussion of historical method.  He ends our reading for this week with a vision of “seeing like an historian.”  What do you think has been the most interesting or insightful part of Gaddis text on “seeing like an historian,” and why do you think that it is so important?