Details

Subject(s)

• Historiography—United States [Browse]
• Objectivity [Browse]

Series

• Ideas in context ; 13. [More in this series]
• Ideas in context ; 13 [More in this series]

Summary note

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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and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

Notes

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

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.

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ISBN

9780511816345 (ebook)

Statement on language in description

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