For this portion you will write a 500 word response to an essay that a classmate wrote, write a response pertaining to the text that you read in the last post. stay in context with the reading, with the essay that you wrote and also the one your classmate has written dont simply say i agree with what you said for example. Below is the question that my classmate chose and her answer.
- Gaddis tells us in his first chapter of The Landscape of History that time travel, like what we might see in ascience fiction story, will not actually benefit the work of historian. However, his theories suggest that in adifferent way a historian is involved in time travel. Describe and explain his reasoning.
One of the most interesting topics that Gaddis talked about is his deep belief in the complex reality throughout history. The importance of understanding history and the importance of human actions and intelligence involves a sort of need to understand the mind of a man in a certain point in time. The interesting ideas in discussing history is the need to understand the recognition of patterns and that idea often times leads Gaddis to end up finding similarities in other parts of his life. A lot of Gaddis and his reasoning for not relying or time traveling to the past to try and make sense of detail is the problem with not being able to analyze and make ideas about the future, even though it is the job and habit to look to the past, the future is equally as important and it is equally important to find pattern or predict pattern there as well. He makes great points about only being able to represent the past and not actually be able to obtain it or go back to it, there is not changing it so what good is it really to stay there or “time travel” back to it. Gaddis has reasoning leading back to the fact that living a certain experience is much different from understanding it and that this is where historians find their faults, in not being able to completely understand something because they are busy trying to live things that are in the past instead of study the human intent or human involvement.
Gaddis goes on, in great detail, describing the way that someone who is living and studying the current moment in time is in no way lacking knowledge as compared to a person who is studying the past or past events. Gaddis believes that an important detail of historians or an important feature of what they do is that they look at the bigger picture of things or the whole “landscape” this means that they understand the past for what it really ended up meaning to us now as opposed to how it used to mean then. This may give us more insight then it would have meant to just experience something a long time ago, there is more detail in the understanding then in the act. There is a lot of similarities between what we are experiencing now and what we learn from the past in the large spectrum of things, in the “landscape” of things. There is a lot in the idea that as we grow older into our own lives and our own futures we are bringing in a lot of ideas and understanding more in life and we live it and this is similar to the idea of people studying the past and looking at the bigger picture of things. It is like reliving certain moments of your life when all that mattered is what you learned from it.
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