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

Peter Novick, Department of Cell Biology School of Medicine Peter Novick

Cambridge University Press, Sep 30, 1988 - History - 648 pages

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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - cpg - LibraryThing

Enjoyed by this layman In this book, Novick says that he finds the idea of historical objectivity "essentially confused", that many of the philosophical assumptions behind it are "logically and ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - JFBallenger - LibraryThing

Thick enough to stun an ox, it is hard to imagine someone picking this up outside of an academic context. (I read it in a graduate historiography seminar.) But it is a masterful exploration of one of the central problems of historical writing.

About the author

Peter Novick is professor emeritus of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "The Resistance Versus Vichy" & "That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' & the American Historical Profession.

Bibliographic information

• Title: That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession; Cambridge Paperback Library; Issue 13 of Ideas in Context, ISSN 0962-4945; That Noble Dream: The "objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, Peter Novick, ISBN 968691465X, 9789686914658
• Authors: Peter Novick, Department of Cell Biology School of Medicine Peter Novick
• Editors: Quentin Skinner, James Tully
• Contributors: Lorraine Daston, Dorothy Ross
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1988
• ISBN: 0521343283, 9780521343282
• Length: 648 pages
• Subjects: History / Historiography; History / Social History; Political Science / History & Theory