That noble dream : the "objectivity question" and the American historical profession / Peter Novick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Novick, Peter, 1934-2012, author.

Series:

Ideas in context ; 13.

Ideas in context ; 13

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historiography--United States.

Historiography.

Objectivity.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 648 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and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

Contents:

The European legacy : Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert

The professionalization project

Consensus and legitimation

A most genteel insurgency

Historians on the home front

A changed climate

Professionalism stalled

Divergence and dissent

The battle joined

The defense of the West

A convergent culture

An autonomous profession

The collapse of comity

Every group its own historian

The center does not hold

There was no king in Israel.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-139-88178-7

1-107-26360-3

1-107-26320-4

1-107-26428-6

1-107-26984-9

1-107-26677-7

0-511-81634-0