November 8, 2002

'The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past'

By NINA C. AYOUB

To see like a historian, writes John Lewis Gaddis, is to be suspended between a sense of significance and insignificance, detachment and engagement, mastery and humility. His new book, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford University Press), uses graceful metaphors of cartography to explore historical craft and consciousness. The author, a professor at Yale University, shows how historians manipulate elements of time, space, and scale in their investigations. But what