Like Kate, I think Gaddis' book has been my favorite of the term. I think he just has a great way of expressing his views and illustrating examples. That said, I am beginning to be annoyed with how Historians are a product of their time and that they are influenced by their own experiences and by historians before them. I feel like we’ve been talking about those facts all term and to me, that’s an obvious point in reading (history or any other subject) and in life in general. Every opinion is going to vary and every historian will look at events differently. I don’t know if I’m just diminishing significance but to me it’s obvious.

Anyway, I loved Gaddis’ discussion of selectivity, simultaneity, and scale and how “historians have no choice but to engage in them.” I liked the example of the time machine and how if a historian were to pick their area of study and visit it, that experience might actually be counterproductive because of the narrow scope in present experiences.

I also liked what Brandon said about the discussion of history vs. the social sciences. In chapters 4 and 5 I found it interesting that Gaddis would say that social scientists oversimplify history “in order to anticipate the future” because I’ve always heard from history teachers that one of the greatest things about history is that we can help solve current problems by learning from our past mistakes. It seems to me that Gaddis wants to focus on how historians so honorably study and analyze history with no other agenda. But I think that everyone hopes that those historians realize that they are responsible to the masses for using their knowledge for the public good. This was the only point that did bother me a little but I still loved the book.