The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis

Gaddis, who teaches at Yale, is the leading American chronicler of the cold war. They have done so, he argues, because they have used as their model the modern social sciences (economics, political science, sociology), when they should be forging connections with natural sciences (physics, geology, evolutionary biology and others). But according to John Lewis Gaddis, in this brief, provocative and intelligent examination of historical scholarship, historians have abandoned a belief in the scientific character of their work too quickly. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with the scholarly world awash in new theories challenging the very idea of truth, faith in the scientific character of historical study has been much more difficult to sustain. The almost simultaneous birth of the modern idea of ''social science'' contributed additional tools to the historical enterprise and reinforced the growing belief that history could take its place alongside the laboratory sciences as an objective search for truth. The modern historical profession owes its birth, to a large degree, to the belief among late-19th-century historians - most notably the great German scholar Leopold von Ranke - that new scientific methods could liberate the study of history from opinion and prejudice, and put scholarship squarely on a foundation of unimpeachable fact.

Is the study of history a science? Can it become one? These questions have divided historians for over a century.

The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis