The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

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The Theory of why we write hsitory

Mapping the Past

More Defense than Method

must read for the historically minded

a unique glimpse into the mind of a master historian

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
John Lewis Gaddis
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

What Is History?

In Defense of History

From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods

Telling the Truth About History

ASIN: 0195171578

Book Description

What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

Customer Reviews:

The Theory of why we write hsitory .......2007-09-18

Gaddis takes an interesting look at how historians have developed the methodologies that make up history. This is an extended survey that considers aspects of biography and the natural sciences. While at times his comparisons can be a stretch there is useful information to be gleamed from this book. First let me start off by saying that this is only for those who really want to look at the philosophical side of why historians write about history. This is not necessarily a book on the how but it explores the perspectives that historians find themselves writing on throughout the course of their works. The comparisons to natural science are either a cry for a more streamlined system of causality or a plea for historians to look at the causal relationships of events. One of the more interesting points Gaddis makes is the idea that historians work backwards to write forwards. We take events that happen in the past and work backwards to find out how they occurred but we present them for our reader in a chronological cause and effect scenario. Overall this is interesting theory but the book wanders too much and really the things he discussed could easily have been said in 75 pages and not 150.

Mapping the Past.......2007-07-26

Gaddis is a giant in the field of history, most notably for his exhaustive studies on the Cold War. What he attempts to do here is give a detailed, scientific description of how the historian does what he does. Contary to some of the other reviewers, I did not find this an easy read. More on that in a minute, first I'll say what I did glean from the book. Gaddis starts off comparing the historian to a geographer. Much like a map-maker is incapable of mapping a large area of terrain while standing on that terrain, a historian cannot accurately describe an event if they are involved in it. You must be outside it, or above it to get all the perspectives and deliver an objective view of the overall situation. This section was good.

Gaddis also tries to argue that history is more of a scientific process than many people realize. In fact, he claims that the historical method has more in common with that of a geologist, physicist, or paleontologist than a social scientist. To argue this point, he uses an array of scientific jargon, analogies, and metaphors. He writes as if he is trying to convince a scientist of the scientific validity of the historian's craft. In fact I read that this book is essentially an expansion of some speeches he gave to science students, attempting to do just that. This is why I had some difficulty with the book. I have virtually no science background and therefore found much of the scientific jargon to be over my head. For Pete's sake, one of the reasons that I'm a history major is because I'm no good at science! Anyway, I do not dispute Gaddis' knowledge or talent in his chosen field, that is not an issue. But I would just offer the warning that if you are not reasonably well-versed in basic scientific concepts, this book will be a challenge. Needless to say, those with a basic understanding of science will no doubt get much more out of this book than I did.

More Defense than Method.......2007-04-04

I've looked at over a dozen books to try and find a good, solid guide for my students to they can have a foot up on thinking historically. Gaddis book is more philosophy and comparisons with social and natural science than it is a book describing historical theory and method. Perhaps I run in my accepting circles but I've never had to defend my historical work or my department against attacks from social or natural scientists; we realize that every discipline has it's own way of gathering, analyzing and using information. By and large this book seemed like a apologia than a guide for historians. While it was a interesting read for me, I firmly believe it would confuse most undergraduates making the audience for this book much more narrow than I had hoped.

must read for the historically minded.......2006-07-06

John Lewis Gaddis has done all who read or make history a great service with his reflections on history: what it is and is not, its limitations, its purposes, its biases. As someone who gets paid for producing historical studies, I found this book particularly helpful with its insights. There are very few jarring notes--the worst being that Gaddis says he agrees with postmodernists that "all our bases for evaluating behavior [i.e. making moral judgments] are themselves artifacts of behavior." Ignore this bit of confusion and enjoy the rest, which is eminently lucid. I particularly liked his comparing what the historian does to what a cartographer does in making a map: first, choosing what landscape to depict, what the emphases will be, and what to leave out. I also liked his comparison of history as a discipline with sciences like paleontology, geology, and astronomy--where experiments cannot be conducted except in the mind. Overall, a significant book; highly recommended.

a unique glimpse into the mind of a master historian.......2006-05-24

A brief, but entirely enjoyable book on the craft of history. John Lewis Gaddis's book is really a collection of speeches he gave during a visiting professorship at Oxford. The speeches center on the art and science of historical research. He challenges the view held by many social scientists that downplay historians as storytellers whose craft lack the rigor of the scientific method. Gaddis claims that the historical method is more complex that most realize and that historians have more in common with evolutionary biologists and astronomers than economists and political scientists. Despite the academic nature of the subject, the chapters are very readable, since they were written as speeches. The only downside was his attempts at pop-culture humor in an attempt to seem hip to the Oxford audience. A man of his standing in the field of Soviet history has nothing to prove to a bunch of British 19-year olds.

Nevertheless, the book offers a unique glimpse into the mind of a master historian. Good history reads easily, with beautiful narrative, deep research, and thought-provoking analysis. This Gaddis book describes how complex the process can be. It made me appreciate first rate history even more.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

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Philosophy Without the Pain
Not a "how-to"
The lectures were even better ...
Science Envy
A fog as thick as pea soup

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
John Lewis Gaddis
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Historiography | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0195066529

Book Description

Customer Reviews:

Philosophy Without the Pain.......2004-03-19

Gaddis examines the nature of history and the function of historians through a wide range of metaphors. By putting forth the question: How long is the British coast line? Gaddis immediately sets out that if we measure in miles we won't get to the alcoves and cubbyholes and we'll probably end up with a nice round number. If we measure in microns and millimeters, it'll take a while but we'll measure every single bend and dog leg and we'll have a much larger number. Many of Gaddis' metaphors spur philosophical discussions but he does not approach them with a philosophical background, instead he sets out to solve a functional question: What is history? Is it a natural science? If it is, then why can we not replicate any historical findings as biology and physiology can? Is it a social science? Then why do other social sciences like economics and anthropology try to find an independent variable upon which everything hangs when historians try to put out the bigger picture? Gaddis' conclusion then is that history is its own beast. It does not mirror either the hard sciences nor the social sciences although it may pick up some of their properties.

Gaddis uses metaphors that seem to have little connection with hsitory, such as fractal geometry and natural sciences. The connections are then developed and this may be a way of making scientists understand the nature of history or giving students with a familiarity in natural sciences a correlation to the study of history. Also, Gaddis' humor makes a philosophical discussion of history a little less tense and certainly more cheerful.

All in all, this book is very readable for a historiography and may appeal to non-historians seeking a perspective on history. The chapters read more like the text of a speech than a textbook so the minimal 140 or so pages will make this a very easy read.

Not a "how-to".......2003-05-02

This short (151 pages) book, really an extended essay, is more of a philosophical meditation on the nature of the historian's craft than it is an instruction manual of historical method. But this is not an esoteric treatise on the nature of causation, or a reflection on such deep questions as the nature of truth, although these issues are addressed briefly, particularly in the chapter entitled, "Causation, Contingency, and Counterfactuals." Most of the work, however, is devoted to various comparisons of History with Science. There are some tremendously interesting observations here. Gaddis points out that many branches of science, such as geology and evolutionary science, are founded on propositions that are no more experimentally verifiable than are the observations of historians. It is worth noting that these, like history, deal with events that occur over extended periods of time. He also draws parallels with modern physics (relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) and fractal geometry, and makes allusions to certain aspects of chaos theory and set theory. One scientific area that he does not mention is computer science, but the study of neural networks and programs employing "fuzzy logic" could also be used to bolster his contention that many fields of modern science contain within their basic postulates an element of uncertainty and unpredictability that mirror the apparent capriciousness of the course of human affairs. He draws a distinction between those areas of science and others, particularly the "social sciences" and especially economics, which, in his view, attempt to describe complex problems in terms of rigid, categorically independent and dependent variables. Because these approaches oversimplify to the point of absurdity, he argues that they cannot approximate, or, in his formulation, "represent" reality to an acceptable degree.

There is much in this short book to provoke thought. I don't know much about chaos theory or fractal geometry, and so I cannot comment as to whether Gaddis is merely picking and choosing from the periphery of those fields to illustrate his point, or whether he is truly describing fundamental similarities. Certainly, he does not provide detailed descriptions. And that, perhaps, is the main weakness of the book. The flip tone that he employs at numerous points undermines the seriousness of the discussion and contributes to an impression of a dilettantism, which is not mitigated by a more detailed description of the complex scientific concepts to which he alludes. The overall sense is of undergraduate lectures by a bright professor who is trying to connect his young audience with some difficult concepts. In some ways, however, that is a strength, in that the argument is more accessible than it would be otherwise. But there is a price to be paid.

The lectures were even better ..........2003-02-19

I had the privilege of attending Prof. Gaddis' lectures in Oxford, and enjoyed every minute of it. His writing accurately reflects the lectures; the only thing missing is the Q&A at the end.

This is not a methodological how-to for historians, it is a philosophical look at the tradecraft, mostly done by comparing it to other disciplines, especially the hard sciences and social sciences. Historians will no doubt enjoy reviewing (maybe reitering) what they've been doing all along; students will undoubtedly learn much from this study.

Many of the critical comments during the Q&A reflected current fads in historiography, such as subaltern studies, triumphalism, etc. Some of this made it into the book, in Prof. Gaddis' emphasis on solid academic analysis. It is impossible to achieve a totally detached point of view, but the historian should strive toward that goal through the rigors of an honest review of the facts, and the subsequent interpretation. Causation is a difficult point here, in that the latest fads attempt to ascribe causation to whatever their favorite subaltern. Prof. Gaddis notes that causation is perhaps the best we can hope for, turning the clock backwards, searching for the point of no return in events leading to the subject in question.

His use of metaphors lends much humor to the book, I especially empathized with the one about the spilled truckload of Marmite on the highway between Oxford and London.

All in all, a delightful book to read, I hope it quickly replaces the really tedious textbooks normally assigned to the study of historiography; it will add greatly to classes on methodology.

Thanks you, Prof. Gaddis, for this witty, eminently readable gem of a book.

Science Envy.......2003-01-14

First delivered as lectures at Oxford, "The Landscape of History" is eloquent, short, witty -- and evanescent. The reader should know that author Gaddis does NOT describe how historians weigh evidence and construct narratives about the past on the basis of surviving documents and other data. Instead, he attempts to put the discipline of history on a solid intellectual foundation by stressing its similarities to observation-based disciplines such as astronomy and paleontology, which, like history, do not rely on repeatable laboratory experiments yet manage to achieve the status of "hard" sciences. The effort to defend history's intellectual credentials is unnecessary since our ability to make sense of past human conduct is part of human self-understanding and thus stands in no need of "foundations." It is also farfetched: I almost put down the book for good when Gaddis outlined the affinities between biography and fractal geometry. On the other hand, the chapter on causation and counterfactuals is quite good. My advice to prospective buyers: wait for "The Landscape of History" to show up in remaindered book catalogues, which should happen by 2004. In the meantime, read some essays on historiography by Isaiah Berlin or Michael Oakeshott.

A fog as thick as pea soup.......2002-12-15

If it wasn't for Gaddis' reputation as a historian, I doubt this little book would have garnered so much attention. Gaddis had noble aspirations to complete the studies of Bloch and Carr, but unfortunately those aspirations seemed to get the better of him, as he came up far short of his predecessors. There are some clever little musings in this collection of essays, but very little that reveals the art or science of history.

He starts with the evocative painting on the cover, referring to history as mist-shrouded landscape which historians hope to reveal. If he would have stuck with this metaphor, and elaborated on it in a series of revealing essays, then this might have indeed been a trenchant study of history. Instead, Gaddis unabashedly lets the metaphors fall where they may, mixing them freely, and in the end coming up with a fog as thick as pea soup.

He makes a case for the narrative form in history, at the expense of the "mechanical view" fostered by the study of the natural sciences. It has only been since the natural sciences adopted the the narrative form with its inherit complexities that Gaddis feels the natural sciences have come closer to the approach historians use to reveal the past. But, Gaddis is too caught up in his use of metaphors to reveal the "ductwork" of the Historian's craft. In the end, he says that this is the principal tool historians have at their disposal to relate the past to the present.

Book Description

This unique collection of primary documents and important scholarly articles tells the fascinating and tragic story of Russia's twentieth century. Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, an eminent historian and political scientist, The Structure of Soviet History illustrates both the revolutionary changes and the broad continuities in Soviet history. It discusses the history, not only of the Russian people, but of other Soviet peoples as well--the nationalities that made up the tsarist and Soviet empires and formed independent states in the early 1990s. This volume enables students to delve beyond traditional narratives to look at the building blocks of history--archival documents, memoirs, and interpretive essays by the leading experts in the field. Students will learn about the fall of the tsarist empire, the hopes and aspirations of the revolutionary years, the brutalities of the Stalin years, the attempts to reform the country in the last decades of Soviet power, and finally, the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of fifteen fragile republics. Rather than imposing a single view on students, The Structure of Soviet History allows them to come up with their own, fresh interpretations of a controversial and often misunderstood experience. Organized chronologically and covering political, social, and cultural history from a variety of viewpoints, the readings examine all of the major events and principal interpretations of Soviet history. Selections include official pronouncements and dissident manifestos, public speeches and private letters, and previously untranslated documents. Suny's introductory essay provides the broad outlines of Soviet history, while the chapter introductions summarize the main features and historical debates of each period. Each document is prefaced by a brief headnote that identifies the author and places the work in context; explanatory notes are also included to define words and events that may not be familiar to students. A truly unique text, The Structure of Soviet History is ideal for use in undergraduate courses on the history of the Soviet Union as well as introductory courses on Soviet politics.

STRUCTURE OF SOVIET HISTORY: ESSAYS & DOCUMENTS

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STRUCTURE OF SOVIET HISTORY: ESSAYS & DOCUMENTS
SUNY
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKFP8I

The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents

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The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents
Ronald Grigor Suny
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKBSR0

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Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents.
Ronald Grigor Suny
Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000M4N34Y

Book Description

Assuming no prior MATLAB experience, this clear, easy-to-read book walks readers through the ins and outs of this powerful software for technical computing
Generously illustrated through computer screen shots and step-by-step tutorials that are applied in the areas of mathematics, science, and engineering
Clearly shows how MATLAB is used in science and engineering

Customer Reviews:

Great for learning the basics of MATLAB........2007-08-18

I purchased this title because I am starting a numerical analysis sequence next year using Matlab and I knew only how to plot in 2D and do simple calculations at the command line. After studying from Gilat's text for the past month or so I feel very comfortable using Matlab for all the basics and I am ready to learn how to exploit the full power of the program.

Each chapter gives just enough mathematical background to provide anyone with at least college algebra/trig enough to understand what is going on.
Although this book does not cover any topic too deeply, it does cover the fundamentals of many aspects of Matlab in a way that allows the reader to move fairly quickly through the whole book without getting bogged down in any one area.

In the end you will know the basics about how Matlab operates: how to work with vectors and matrices, how to write simple programs and function files, how to plot and format data, how to fit data to a curve, and how to differentiate and integrate both numerically and symbolically, and a bunch of other great tools for solving problems.

Also, as the other reviewers mentioned, the book makes very good use of graphics to show how input and output should look, as well as what exactly each line means.

I would recommend this text to anyone wanting to learn the basics of Matlab.

Reader.......2007-04-23

If you plan to start with Matlab with no prior experience, this book beats most of the other available titles.Since an inside view of the book is not available on Amazon, I will for the benefit of others list out the chapters here.Ch1 begins with the necessary introduction,developing familiarity with the command window,display formats and precedence of operators.It moves on to Ch2 and Ch3 where arrays are introduced and the mathematical operations on them explained.Ch4 is about script files,Ch5 on elementary plotting techniques using in-built functions like plot and fplot.Ch6 introduces functions and Ch7 extends the previous material to formal programming techniques like loops and control structures.Ch8 explains curve fitting and interpolation,Ch9 is about three dimensional plots and special graphics.Ch10, the last one of the book uses Matlab to do symbolic math which cover elementary algebraic equations.The examples contained in the book are from elementary physics and engineering,so if you are looking for more advanced material that has been treated using Matlab,this might be a little less helpful.The numerical techniques again cover simple problems like projectile trajectory,flow of water from a vessel with a small hole punched in its sidewall,RC circuits, viscosity and so on.Relatively advanced topics like Fourier transforms and applications to signal processing are also left out.If you are done with this book or feel that the material isnt of much help, I will suggest that you might try "Numerical Computing with Matlab" by Moler(he is perhaps one of the architects of Matlab).This book(electronic version) is available for free from the mathworks website [...].Overall this book does a good job in explaining details and is also generously sprinkled with figures and screenshots.Please try it if you are first timer to Matlab.

Very good introduction.......2006-05-04

I had never used matlab when I started reading this book and I found it very easy to follow. I now have a good working understanding of the matlab basics and I recommend that anyone who's looking to get started with matlab pick up a copy.

The perfect introductory text for MATLAB.......2005-12-08

If you are completely new to MATLAB then you will find no better book to guide you through the basics. It is perfectly suited for teaching yourself several basic but still very interesting and useful programming techniques. Topics are presented to the reader in an order carefully determined to produce maximum benefit and knowledge. The book is short and very readable, with many example programs.

In short: if you want a FIRST introductory textbook for MATLAB, you can't beat this book. And it covers the latest version (Release 14).

A truly excellent text!.......2005-11-21

This book was written for teaching Matlab to freshmen in an introductory engineering course, so most of the examples are from first year physics and engineering. Nevertheless, after looking at all competing texts, I chose it to teach Matlab to sophomore geology majors, most of whom had not yet taken calculus or physics. I was very happy with the results; by the end of the semester the students were well on their way to being competent programmers, and I think they will find calculus and physics much easier because of their experience with this book.

I chose this text because it is very well written--you can tell the author has had long experience teaching the subject--and because of its many excellent examples. Most people learn faster by example than by theory, and the examples in this book are easier to follow than those of other texts. Each example shows the command window with a gray background and white insets, or call-outs, containing explanations. The pages are attractive.

In the main text, Matlab commands are set in Courier to clearly distinguish them from the discussion itself. Sections are fairly short and easy to follow, and at the end of each chapter there are many problems of gradually increasing difficulty. The solutions to some problems are given at the back of the book. The abundance of complete examples makes it easy to skip around in the book as soon as students are familiar with Matlab syntax. There are astonishingly few typos and none were serious. Cell arrays and structures are used only where needed for particular commands, a wise pedagogical decision. I particularly enjoyed the second edition's new chapter on symbolic math, as I had never used this part of Matlab in my own research.

The book is 7.5"x9.25" in size with 343 pages, and so is easy to carry around. It's inexpensive, as textbooks go nowadays.

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Great book, no need to purchase.
The book by the architect of Matlab
explains floating point methods, not integer methods

Numerical Computing with Matlab
Cleve B. Moler
Manufacturer: Society for Industrial Mathematics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0898715601

Book Description

This is a lively textbook for an introductory course in numerical methods, MATLAB, and technical computing, with an emphasis on the informed use of mathematical software. The presentation helps readers learn enough about the mathematical functions in MATLAB to use them correctly, appreciate their limitations, and modify them appropriately. The book makes extensive use of computer graphics, including interactive graphical expositions of numerical algorithms. It provides more than 70 M-files, which can be downloaded from the text Web site www.mathworks.com/moler. Many of the numerous exercises involve modifying and extending these programs. The topics covered include an introduction to MATLAB; linear equations; interpolation; zeros and roots; least squares; quadrature; ordinary differential equations; Fourier analysis; random numbers; eigenvalues and singular values; and partial differential equations. Motivating applications include modern problems from cryptography, touch-tone dialing, Google page-ranking, atmospheric science and image processing, as well as classical problems from physics and engineering.

Customer Reviews:

Great book, no need to purchase. .......2007-03-20

Great text for the student of matlab. Matlab is very generous with online documentation, and this content can be found at the matlab website with some creative google-whacking. All code and data files are also available.

The book by the architect of Matlab.......2006-01-29

This is one of the original Matlab developers. A good book follows the book by Heath on Scientific Computing with a focus on Matlab. It's available for free at www.mathworks.com/moler

explains floating point methods, not integer methods.......2005-01-25

Moler provides you with a good introduction to the main ideas of numerical analysis. To do this, and to make useful examples that you can follow, he also chose Matlab as the numerical package. The book's contents are focused on floating point methods. Like numerical integration, and solving partial differential equations.

There is a brief section on integer arithmetic methods - using cryptography as an example. But if you need discrete methods, turn to other texts.

The book also does not use the symbolic algebra capabilities of Matlab. [As you may know, the competing package, Mathematica, is reknowned for its symbolic algebra.]

Useful for students of the physical sciences and engineering.

Scientific Computing with MATLAB and Octave (Texts in Computational Science and Engineering)

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easy to understand and use algorithms

Scientific Computing with MATLAB and Octave (Texts in Computational Science and Engineering)
Alfio Quarteroni
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 354032612X

Book Description

This textbook is an introduction to Scientific Computing, in which several numerical methods for the computer solution of certain classes of mathematical problems are illustrated. The authors show how to compute the zeros or the integrals of continuous functions, solve linear systems, approximate functions by polynomials and construct accurate approximations for the solution of ordinary and partial differential equations. To make the presentation concrete and appealing, the programming environments Matlab and Octave, which is freely distributed, are adopted as faithful companions. The book contains the solutions to several problems posed in exercises and examples, often originating from specific applications. A specific section is devoted to subjects which were not addressed in the book and contains the bibliographical references for a more comprehensive treatment of the material. The second edition features many new problems and examples, as well as more numerical methods for linear and nonlinear systems and ordinary and partial differential equations.

This book is presently being translated or has appeared in the following languages: Italian, German, French, Chinese and Spanish.

Customer Reviews:

easy to understand and use algorithms.......2005-04-11

As you would expect from Springer, here is a technically very accurate book. It goes over the main concepts of numerical analysis, which the authors call "scientific computing". Same thing, really. Unlike earlier years, where someone studying this field would have to write out her own Fortran code to apply the methods, we now have MATLAB. The authors chose this powerful package as one in which to explain and implement the algorithms.

These algorithms are essentially unchanged from what a book on the topic might have described, 20 years ago. Finding numerical integrals, roots of equations, solving linear systems of equations etc.

But using MATLAB helps streamline any coding. And you are encouraged to code, in the problems supplied by the book. There are even answers to some of these. So quite apart from understanding the concepts, a bonus is that you can become quite adept at fully using MATLAB's abilities as a research tool.

Book Description

The 1973 Marine Mammal Protection Act at first appeared to be a major victory for environmentalists. It banned the use of oversized fishing nets in an attempt to save thousands of dolphins killed each year in tuna harvests. But hampered by exemptions, extensions, delays, and quotas, MMPA has instead created international turmoil in the tuna industry while still allowing some 20,000 dolphin deaths each year.

In this revealing book, Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas Constance use the tuna-dolphin controversy to explore the rapidly increasing effects of globalization on agricultural and food production. Illustrating how private industries, political institutions, national economies, and social movements have been swept into a global arena, they reach some intriguing and important conclusions about the complex and sometimes bewildering future of industry and the environment.

Analyzing the controversy's outcome, they show how relatively small groups can, with effective organization, pass legislation that fundamentally changes the way corporations do business. The globalization that often results, they contend, can have wide-reaching consequences--many of them unintended and unpredictable. Following passage of MMPA, U.S. tuna processors turned to foreign suppliers of "dolphin-safe" tuna while U.S. tuna fishing corporations deserted the U.S. market--circumventing MMPA altogether. Bilateral international agreements, GATT, NAFTA, and the U.S. federal courts have intervened in the chaos and have been challenged from all sides--from the Bush Administration to Bumble Bee Tuna, from Greenpeace to the European Economic Community.

Through it all, independent owners of fishing boats have been forced out of business, U.S. processing jobs have moved overseas, and environmentalists have continued their dolphin campaign. Even those who appear to be benefiting may not be, the authors demonstrate. Despite increased opportunities for some foreign labor forces, the weakest segments--especially in developing countries--continue to be exploited.

Stressing the limits that individual nations face in the current socio-economic climate and the conflicting agendas of a variety of labor and environmental movements, Bonanno and Constance argue that the regulatory ability of any national government--even one with strong society support--must be rethought and redefined.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting.......2000-08-16

This book was interesting. It led me through a topic that I knew nothing about and left me with a good understanding of the Tuna fisheries of the world. The information presented in the book is brought forth to the reader in a very clear and easy manor. Becuase of this I would suggest it for anyone who is in search of a general understanding of Tuna as a fish and as a global industry.

La lata del atún.(salvando los delfines, México)(TT: Tuna can.)(TA: saving the dolphins, Mexico): An article from: Siempre!

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La lata del atún.(salvando los delfines, México)(TT: Tuna can.)(TA: saving the dolphins, Mexico): An article from: Siempre!
René Anaya
Manufacturer: Edicional Siempre
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B0008H6J0U
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on April 27, 2000. The length of the article is 1261 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: La lata del atÃºn.(salvando los delfines, MÃ©xico)(TT: Tuna can.)(TA: saving the dolphins, Mexico)
Author: RenÃ© Anaya
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: April 27, 2000
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: 46 Issue: 2445 Page: 76

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DOLPHINS & THE TUNA INDUSTRY
Committee on Reducing Porpoise Mortality
Manufacturer: National Academies Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSYCU2

International Dolphin Conservation Program Act : report of the Commitee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on S. 1420 (SuDoc Y 1.1/5:104-373)

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International Dolphin Conservation Program Act : report of the Commitee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on S. 1420 (SuDoc Y 1.1/5:104-373)
U.S. Congressional Budget Office
Manufacturer: U.S. G.P.O.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B000114GB2

Student papers / University of Washington, School of Law

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Student papers / University of Washington, School of Law
Van P Wilson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0006RA9I0

The tragedy continues: Killing of dolphins by the tuna industry

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The tragedy continues: Killing of dolphins by the tuna industry
Todd Steiner
Manufacturer: Whale Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B00072H6LC

Tuna current issues affecting the U.S. industry : report to the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, on investigation no. 332-313, under section ... of 1930 as amended (SuDoc ITC 1.12:332-313)

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Tuna current issues affecting the U.S. industry : report to the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, on investigation no. 332-313, under section ... of 1930 as amended (SuDoc ITC 1.12:332-313)
U.S. Dept of Interior
Manufacturer: U.S. International Trade Commission
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B00010FA04

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