John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: Part One

As you probably saw in a previous post, I have been reading John Lewis Gaddis' work on historiography, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. This particular post will deal with the first four chapters.

One of the topics that Gaddis brings up is time travel and whether it would make someone a better historian. He points out its use in literature, citing Michael Crichton's Timeline and Connie Willis' Doomsday Book as examples of graduate students jumping back in time for their thesis work.

Michael Crichton's time traveling novel Timeline

Gaddis' main point when it comes to time travel, however, is that, despite it being extremely exciting to see all of these wonderful places and people within their context, "the direct experience of events isn't necessarily the best path toward understanding them, because your field of vision extends no further than your own immediate senses" (4). In other words, going back in time to study the French Revolution, for example, is a bad idea because, since the time traveler will be too busy avoiding Madame la Guillotine, mobs of angry Parisians, and other horrible events on the ground to truly experience the wide affect of events.

I disagree with Gaddis, here, however. Gaddis' statement seems to cover every single type of historical study. But what if you are a historian interested in the social impact of an event? Time travel would be a perfect medium for someone to understand what it was like to live, breath, and survive in times as turbulent as the French Revolution, the War of the Roses, or the Hundred Years War. Imagine what it would be like, as a social historian, to discover what the people of England really thought about the Yorks and the Lancasters - or whether they even cared who was on the throne, so long as there was a king. 

Time travel gives more of a chance for a historian to learn about the things that don't find their ways into the textbooks. Stepping into a time machine, a historian can learn about the social structure at Versailles, not simply by reading about it, but by experiencing it for himself. And he can choose when he wants to go to - the beginning of Versailles' strict etiquette under Louis XIV, or its final lapse under Louis XVI. The possibilities for studying social strata are endless.

Because Gaddis' statement is an all-encompassing denial of the benefits of time travel, I cannot help but disagree with him. There are definitely benefits to traveling through time for a social historian, as it allows for the discovery of information that is left out of many documents, simply because it was irrelevant or so commonplace that it was uninteresting to the chroniclers of the era. By traveling through time, historians would discover new things about a time and its people, and maybe even completely change their perspectives and attitudes towards the cultures they study.