That Noble Dream
The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession

Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity were elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the last century.

Peter Novick (Author)

9780521357456, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 September 1988

662 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.88 kg

'An astute and provocative account of how the historical profession in America has dealt with its founding myth and central norm - the ideal of objectivity.' Dorothy Ross

The aspiration to relate the past 'as it really happened' has been the central goal of American professional historians since the late nineteenth century. In this remarkable history of the profession, Peter Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity were elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the last century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Eugene Genovese, That Noble Dream is a richly textured account of what American historians have thought they were doing, or ought to be doing, when they wrote history - how their principles influenced their practice and practical exigencies influenced their principles.

Preface
Introduction: nailing jelly to the wall
Part I. Objectivity Enthroned: 1. The European legacy: Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert
2. The professionalization project
3. Consensus and legitimation
4. A most genteel insurgency
Part II. Objectivity Besieged: 5. Historians on the home front
6. A changed climate
7. Professionalism stalled
8. Divergence and dissent
9. The battle joined
Part III. Objectivity Reconstructed: 10. The defense of the West
11. A convergent culture
12. An autonomous profession
Part IV. Objectivity in Crisis: 13. The collapse of comity
14. Every group its own historian
15. The center does not hold
16. There was no king in Israel
Appendix: manuscript collections cited
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]