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.