The Landscape Of History

Download or read book The Landscape of History written by John Lewis Gaddis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

Download or read book The Landscape of History written by John Lewis Gaddis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

Download or read book Trace written by Lauret Savoy and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

Download or read book Reading the Landscape of America written by May Theilgaard Watts and published by Nature Study Guild Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this natural history classic, the author takes the reader on field trips to landscapes across America, both domesticated and wild. She shows how to read the stories written in the land, interpreting the clues laid down by history, culture, and natural forces. A renowned teacher, writer and conservationist in her native Midwest, Watts studied with Henry Cowles, the pioneering American ecologist. She was the first to explain his theories of plant succesion to the general public. Her graceful, witty essays, with charming illustrations by the author, are still relevant and engaging today, as she invites us to see the world around us with fresh eyes.

Download or read book The Uses and Abuses of History written by Margaret MacMillan and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past is capricious enough to support every stance - no matter how questionable. In 2002, the Bush administration decided that dealing with Saddam Hussein was like appeasing Hitler or Mussolini, and promptly invaded Iraq. Were they wrong to look to history for guidance? No; their mistake was to exaggerate one of its lessons while suppressing others of equal importance. History is often hijacked through suppression, manipulation, and, sometimes, even outright deception. MacMillan's book is packed full of examples of the abuses of history. In response, she urges us to treat the past with care and respect.

Download or read book Petrolia written by Brian Black and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning history provides a fascinating look at the Civil War era oil boom in western Pennsylvania and its devastating impact on the region. In Petrolia, Brian Black offers a geographical and social history of a region that was not only the site of America’s first oil boom but was also the world’s largest oil producer between 1859 and 1873. Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley’s descent into environmental hell. Known as “Petrolia,” the region of northwestern Pennsylvania charged the popular imagination with its nearly overnight transition from agriculture to industry. But so unrestrained were these early efforts at oil drilling, Black writes, that “the landscape came to be viewed only as an instrument out of which one could extract crude.” In a very short time, Petrolia was a ruined place—environmentally, economically, and to some extent even culturally. Black gives historical detail and analysis to account for this transformation. Winner of the Paul H. Giddens Prize in Oil History from Oil Heritage Region, Inc.

Download or read book Landscape of Industry written by Worcester Historical Museum and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated history of the cradle of American industrialization