The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past by John Lewis Gaddis

Author:John Lewis Gaddis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: American, Philosophy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Fiction & Literature, History
ISBN: 0000195171578
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-11-14T08:00:00+00:00

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t h e l a n d s c a p e o f h i s t o r y person, or another age, but then to find your way out again. Through all of this I’ve indulged outrageously in metaphors—everything from Marmite spilled along the M-40 to postmodernist supertankers plow-ing toward the British coastline—as a means of pushing you into looking at some familiar issues in unfamiliar ways, rather in the way that Gertrude Stein found herself doing when she flew across the United States in 1938 and was surprised to see the landscape below taking on the lines, shapes, and colors of cubist art.1

Which brings me to yet another landscape seen from above. It’s on the cover of my Yale colleague James C. Scott’s recent book, Seeing Like a State. It shows two apparently inexplicable right-angle bends in a road built across a flat North Dakota prairie. There is an explanation, though: the roads follow township boundaries laid out on the sys-North Dakota road adjusting for the convergence of longitude lines as they approach the North Pole. Alex S. MacLean photograph, © 1994, reproduced in James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 56.

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tem of six-square-mile grids which the United States government imposed, not just on North Dakota but on all of the American Mid-west, when it surveyed that territory during the nineteenth century.

The bends in the road reflect the fact that lines of longitude converge as you move toward the North Pole; hence the boundaries and the roads following them must adjust as well.2 Perish the thought, in this state-sanctioned method of road building, that there should be anything other than ninety-degree angles in making the adjustments. No short cuts allowed.

Now contrast this with one of the most elegant public spaces in Europe, which happens to lie in the middle of Oxford. No government designed the great curve of the High as it sweeps from Carfax down to Magdalen bridge, and no architect did either. Rather it was created by cattle: as the name of the town suggests, it was the path taken by oxen making their way from the ford across the Thames or Isis to the one across the Cherwell, and back again.3

Scott uses his North Dakota image to symbolize what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible—by which he means measurable and hence manipulable—that governments can impose and maintain their authority.

“These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, [they] enable much of the reality they [depict] to be remade.”4

Not all of it, though, for there remain plenty of places like Oxford where governments had no choice but to retrofit their authority to what was already there.

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