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 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. (shrink)

This book questions essential to the student of history - What is history?; Why do History?; and How does one do history? Marwick has totally recast and rewritten the first version of the book, published in 1970, and given it a new coherence and a new dynamic thrust derived from the threewords of the subtitle, "knowledge, evidence, language." Using these categories, he presents the first clear and comprehensive expression of the case against postmodernism in an undergraduate textbook. Arguing that the (...) substance of history is evidence, not speculation, Marwick explicates theproduction of history as a body of knowledge. He outlines the actual activities of a working historian in discussions on the necessity of precise language, the analysis and interpretation of primary and secondary sources, and the vital distinctions between the "witting" and "unwitting" testimony ofprimary sources. This volume, written deftly in explicit and precise language and including a thorough index, is an ideal companion for students and writers of history at all levels. (shrink)

Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations in Melanesia have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness, and with equal good humour, the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life.