John Lewis Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University, the recipient of multiple writing awards and a distinguished author. Motivated to display the importance of historical consciousness, Gaddis wrote the book The Landscape of History. In this book, Gaddis argues against multiple fields of social sciences while providing insight to historians about stronger research and analysis methods. This book is a combination of writings and lectures performed by Gaddis. By using relevant modern examples, Gaddis is able to argue against forms of social science while promoting different forms of historical thinking.
One of Gaddis’ main points in this book is focused on the importance of causation. Gaddis argues that it is important when writing or thinking about history to consider the context that led to an event. When doing so, an important distinction to make is “the distinction between the immediate, the intermediate, and the distant”. 1 Thereby, this distinction groups events contextually and explains the events’ relevance. For example, the first group, immediate, is simply whatever occurred at the time of the event. These distinctions are important because historians must be careful when providing context. Gaddis contextualizes this by explaining the historical context of the Pearl Harbor attack. “It would make no sense, for example, to begin an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the launching of the planes from their carriers; you’d want to know how the carriers came to be within range of Hawaii”.2 When providing context, it is important to not use one of the three groups distinguished above. An example of too much immediate context is exemplified with the Pearl Harbor attack. Providing too much intermediate and distant context is also a mistake. When searching for causation of an event, Gaddis describes a “principal of diminishing relevance”.3 He describes this principal as “is it that the greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant we presume that cause to be”.4 In theory, it is possible to tie the true causation of every event back to the Big Bang. However, this principal states that the farther back in time one goes to look for causation the less relevant it is. This principal is helpful when looking for the causation of an event, which Gaddis thinks is extremely important.
Based on causation, Gaddis presents another idea in The Landscape of History which is “the point of no return.” Gaddis describes the point of no return as, “the moment at which an equilibrium that once existed ceased to do so as a result of whatever it is we’re trying to explain”.5 In other words, the point of no return represents a change in events that disrupts the peace that was once had. This process, Gaddis explains, is much like the paleontological principal “punctuated equilibrium” “rather, long periods of stability are “punctuated” by abrupt and destabilizing changes”.6 The idea of no return is one that relies a lot on context. For one event different people could argue that there are multiple points of no return. For these scenarios, Gaddis advises to return to the principal of diminishing relevance, “that gives us license to emphasize some of these over others”.9 Basically, the principal of diminishing relevance states that possible causation events that occur father away, or more distant, are not as relevant as events that are closer to the actual event.
Footnotes:
1 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95.
2 Gaddis, 95.
3 Gaddis, 96.
4 Gaddis, 96.
5 Gaddis, 99.
6 Gaddis, 96.
7 Gaddis, 99.
