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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 was elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the past century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writing of hundreds of American historians, this book is a richly textured account of what American historians have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. Published with the support of the Exxon Education Foundation.
- Sales Rank: #204254 in Books
- Published on: 1988-09-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x 1.34" w x 5.98" l, 1.92 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 662 pages
Review
"Professional historians and aspiring professionals will welcome this immensely informative and thoughtful book." E. Cassara, Choice
"Peter Novick has written an unprecedented and invaluable study of the idea of objectivity among historians...He has written a rich and powerful narrative. No other scholar has made such a marvelous contribution to our understanding of the history profession during its first century." David W. Noble, Reviews in American History
"This is a work marked by admirable clarity, wide-ranging and imaginative research, and thoughtful judgements. At one level it explores a question of central concern to scholars of many disciplines--the quest for objectivity in research and writing. Displaying impressive command of intellectual history, Novick situates this quest in broader currents of American thought over the past century. That Noble Dream is finally a serious and often provocative treatment of the professionalization in the United States of the discipline of history." From the Allen J. Beveridge Award Citation
"This is a work marked by admirable clarity, wide-ranging and imaginative research, and thoughtful judgements. At one level it explores a question of central concern to scholars of many disciplines--the quest for objectivity in reading and writing. Displaying impressive command of intellectual history, Novick situates this quest in broader currents of American thought over the past century. That Noble Dream is finally a serious and often provocative treatment of the professionalization in the United States of the discipline of history." From the Allan C. Beveridge Award Citation
From the Back Cover
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, Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity were elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the last century.
About the Author
Peter Novick is professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Resistance Versus Vichy and That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, which won the American Historical Association's prize for the best book of the year in American history.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Required reading for those in or interested in the American historical discipline.
By Dillon
In the late 1980’s the American historical discipline appeared to be in crisis. Over the previous two decades, the field had fought a war on two fronts: first, the discipline had watched its student enrollment numbers dwindle since its high point in the late-fifties; second, a fifth column tore the discipline apart from within—the difficulty here is in determining whom or what constituted the fifth column. Indeed, it could be interpreted that the American historical discipline had become a fifth column unto itself. This is the image of the historical discipline that Peter Novick closes That Noble Dream with—a discipline so directionless and devoid of solidarity that it was on the verge of breaking apart into sub-disciplines. In the midst of crisis, Novick’s ground-breaking study on the American historical discipline seeks—and largely succeeds in doing so—to trace just how the discipline ended up where it was in the late 1980’s. A firmly contextualist intellectual history, That Noble Dream follows the question of objectivity, i.e. whether or not the historian ought to strive toward objectivity in his or her scholarly work, throughout the history of the American historical discipline and approaches the various reasons for why opinions on the matter changed over time. Like a pendulum caught between Apollo and Dionysus, the majority opinion on the objectivity question shifted back and forth over time. In the tradition of the Cambridge School, Novick gives thorough treatment to the societal factors that gravitated the pendulum from one side to the other.
Novick divides his work into four parts, which happen to coincide with both the popularity or unpopularity of “objective” history and major historical events. This is deliberate (p. 628). At the founding of the American historical discipline in the late-nineteenth century, to be objective—to depict history as it actually happened—was not only seen as an ideal, but as an attainable goal. Novick has various reasons for why this may have occurred: the introduction of the notion of objectivity coincided with America’s emergence as a dominant economic power and intellectuals became caught up in the resulting wave of positivist feeling (p. 21); American scholars mistranslated the Rankean ideal by not taking into account the contemporary ambiguity of “eigentlich,” or “actually” (p. 28); American proclivity toward “unphilosophy” made challenging the quite philosophical ideal impossible (p. 30); finally, that the sudden emergence of the American education industry created such a high demand for college educators that abysmally poor scholarship was able to permeate the historical discipline unchecked (p. 48); further, that the discipline, as new, seemed to require that it be professional and scientific, so that it could be seen as a legitimate academic field (p. 70). What is important to keep in mind here is that Novick does not claim these factors to be purely causal, rather he posits them as symbiotic factors, both aiding and abetting historical opinion. Nonetheless, the objectivists, fact-obsessed—in some instances to the extent that Mr. Gradgrind would be an appropriate comparison—and mistrustful of the newly created social sciences, had taken the throne. “Objectivity” was at the core of the early American historical discipline. It was its founding myth (p. 268).
Faith in the rational was shot to pieces by WWI. “Objective” history had come to be seen as ridiculous, like a commander endlessly, insanely even, sending his troops over the top—just one more bombardment, one more push, one more cavalry charge, and the battle will be won: a true understanding of history will be attained, so long as the ideal of objectivity is history’s soldier of fortune. Charles Beard and Carl Becker led the historical coup de e’tat against the objectivists, arguing that it was not for the past itself that history ought to be studied, rather history ought to be adapted to the Everyman’s needs (p. 256). More importantly, that it was impossible for history to be approached in a purely objective manner (p. 258). Objectivists perceived this as a threat to their very way of life. Relativists saw it as a necessary step toward better understanding history. Importantly, though these two sides clashed, objectivists did not directly take on the assertions of Beard and Becker (p. 260). Objectivists balked, but they had little interest in engaging in a philosophical debate, in much the same way that Ranke’s unphilsophical nature was appealing to the founders of the American historical profession.
Unlike WWI and its outcome, which left many Americans wondering why exactly the United States became involved in the war in the first place, the purpose of WWII was unambiguous: defeat the Japanese because they attacked America. The outcome of WWII reinforced this point: the Nazi’s—nearly mythical in the ways in which they were depicted after the war—had been defeated and now a new enemy loomed: the Soviet Union. Riding a teleological wave, historian’s turned back to objectivity. The historical retrieval of this idea was perpetuated by the massive expansion of the historical discipline after the war, thanks to Cold War dollars flowing through the university system. Ph.D.’s of history had doors outside the academy opened to them. The government needed bodies to run its vastly expanded bureaucracy and brains to devise its policy. An intellectual machine was engineered to engage in a war of ideas (p. 317) on behalf of the newly created “West” (p. 312) against the Soviets, and historians played a significant role in this battle (p. 309). The purpose of history was clear: promote the right idea of history to reinforce national identity, or “Western” identity. This meant a resumption of “fact-based” history, in which the “facts” made clear that the United States was in the right over the Soviet Union (p. 316). Affirmative historiography had made a comeback (p. 320). It would be disingenuous, however, to take this all on its own. As Novick emphasized, the fear of nuclear war was truly present in the minds of historians in the decade following WWII (p. 314). Like the symbiosis that marked the first-wave of objectivism in history, the objectivists in the second-wave were both justified and the justifiers.
As the Cold War thawed, the need for a nationally affirmative historiography became less immediate. Historically oppressed groups rose up in the political sphere. Oppression had gone on long enough, and waiting longer for the the white male majority to right their own historical wrongs was no longer an option. The rights of blacks and women must be seized by blacks and women themselves. This sent waves through the historical discipline. Rather than a nationally affirmative history, these groups sought an identity affirming history by taking pride in their difference and by deconstructing the oppression of the past to better understand their present condition (p. 471). Gone was the universality of history and its practice. Black history was to be written “by blacks for blacks” (p. 491), and this sentiment prevailed in women’s history as well. Black and women’s history seceded into different disciplines, and the hyperspecialization of history, caused in part by the post-WWII academic environment, had begun to make the discipline appear to be a loose confederacy of sub-disciplines, in which historians from one end of the discipline could not even converse with historians on the other side of the discipline. In a discipline inherently unpredictive and therefore non-affirming of itself (p. 582), and one in which its members are mostly indifferent to the philosophy of the discipline itself (p. 593), what other outcome could come about? Is the dissolution of history as a discipline the logical, nigh inevitable, outcome?
And that is the depressing—to some, infuriating—question with which Novick leaves his readers. It is also the point at which skeptics are prompted to assume defensive positions, and justifiably so. History was not and is not in tatters. It is an inherently interdisciplinary discipline, and this point could have been emphasized by Novick further. Another point which Novick did not emphasize enough was one of his implied, albeit central, arguments: that the objectivity debate has done more harm than good to the discipline. He wrote early on in the work that he did not think that “the idea of historical objectivity is true or false” (p. 9). The resulting and recurring self-immolation of the historical discipline on this question, then, was purposeless. Of course, it could be countered that the objectivity debate was not nearly so pointed in the late twentieth-century as it was in the early twentieth-century, but then Novick’s use of Abraham affair sufficiently argues otherwise. These complaints are, generally speaking, questions of manner and preference. Novick’s primary goal in this work—to show how “the evolution of historians’ attitudes on the objectivity question has always been closely tied to changing social, political, cultural, and professional contexts” (p. 628)—was rigorously defended and convincingly conveyed, and it is through this that That Noble Dream deserves seminal recognition.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Good, though not for everybody
By Miguel Aguiar
Novick's book on the "Holocaust and Modern Memory" is a perfect example of craft and honesty by a great historian. "That Noble Dream" is a much more ambitious book, a summing up of American Historiography. It's a great book, but probably only interesting to historians and even historiographers at that. It's focus in American Historiography (though tens of pages are devoted to the German, English a French roots of Historical Knowledge)may also shy away non-Ivy League readers. Still, a must for those interested in the field.
91 of 96 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding chronicle of the American historical profession
By A Customer
"That Noble Dream" is Peter Novick's magisterial history of the American historical profession and its alternating romance and dissaffection with "objective" historical scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s.
The German historical profession with its domineering Herr Professor and impressive array of analytical "techniques," Mr. Novick tells us, provided the initial model for American historiography. In Leopold von Ranke, young American scholars found a paragon of "wissenschaftlich" (interpreted as scientific) empirical scholarship. (Oddly, Ranke was neither a strict empiricist nor particularly scientific in his approach to writing history.) Transferred to the other side of the Atlantic, a mythical interpretation of German historiography served to legitimate an inductive, empirical approach to history that puported to uncover the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen" -- the way it actually was. Eschewing both hypothesis and epistemological speculation, American historians enthroned "objectivity" as the goal of their infant profession.
Mr. Novick explains that the ideal of objectivity was reinforced by an ideologically homogenous group of professional historians who used objectivity as the yardstick for career advancement and as a "prophylactic against conflict" within their ranks. Among other convictions, it was firmly believed that objective scholarship would serve to protect American students from the evils and distortions of propaganda.
It was not long before a reaction developed against these pseudo-Rankean "data gatherers," as they pejoratively came to be known. In the years before the Great War, the new progressive historians (notably Beard and Becker) questioned the idea of cold, indisputable facts and thereby planted the seeds that later would grow into the antithesis of objective scholarship, namely relativism. The new historians were denoted, somewhat unkindly, as "presentists," because of their use of history for the purpose of progressive reform.
With the entry of the United States into the the first World War, objectivity was unceremoniously displaced by propaganda, as America's historians were expected to display a sufficiently patriotic fervor. The profession of the interwar years witnessed the rise of cultural and cognitive relativism in the wake of the new scientific ontology. The quest for certainty and absolutes gave way to the "pragmatic tradition," which saw truths as multiple and perspectival. Becker and Beard, together with their loyal vassals, derided the old-school, inductive approach, which claimed that "facts spoke for themselves."
But World War II initiated a renewed courtship between the profession and its first love. With the rest of American society, historians turned "toward affirmation and the search for certainty." A considerable dosage of moral rearmament, it was believed, would be required to counter the fascist threat, and historians, like others, queued up to the podium in order to denounce the menance of moral relativism.
The totalitarian leviathan, of course, did not disappear after 1945, and Communism proved as good a reason to denigrate relativist epistemology as had fascism. The Cold War, Mr. Novick suggests, "was directly related to the celebration of objectivity as the hallmark of thought in the Free World." Once again, it was claimed that the newly objective, non-ideological historiography, as incorporated into western civilization courses, would insulate young minds against propaganda.
Such is a very compacted version of Mr. Novick's copiously detailed narrative of American historiography (complete with all the gossip on your favorite college history professor) and its flirtation with objectivity down to the Cold War. So have we come full circle? One might be inclined to think so if the story ended there. But the book's final four chapters chronicle the American historical profession of the last generation, during which, according to Mr. Novick, the structural supports of objectivity, namely universalism, nationalism, and professionalism, came under attack. A "separatist consciousness" fragmented black history and women's history into ruthlessly guarded sub-disciplines of their own. The profession became "little more than a congeries if groups" that could no longer communicate with each other in mutually comprehended terms. Fueled by a massive production of scholarly works, fragmentation and specialization proceeded at such a pace that by 1980 "in no other discipline did holders of a Ph.D. have less in the way of a common experience." As a consequence, meaningful discussion of the objectivity question on a profession-wide basis "effectively collapsed." What Mr. Novick describes is, in his view, nothing short of a crisis. He points to a handful of "ecumenists," David Hollinger and Thomas Haskell among them, who attempted to identify an "epistemological vital center" in an effort to bring together a chaotic array of hyper-relativists and hyper-objectivists. Alas, he says, precious few were listening.
Mr. Novick's historiographical Weltanschauung is bleak indeed. Toward the end of "That Noble Dream," he presents a contradictory image of some "cosmopolitan," "supra-disciplinary" historians moving beyond traditional boundaries toward a new, universal approach to scholarship, while other historians seek shelter behind the new boundaries of fragmented subcommunities. Interdisciplinary centripetal forces are juxtaposed against intradisciplinary centrifugal forces. Within the profession the "center cannot hold," while outside the profession, a new universalism is being forged.
Can a new common interest replace the objectivity question as a unifying force within the discipline or at least among several disciplines? Though well over 600 pages long, Mr. Novick's book contains a relative paucity of discussion pertaining to teaching. Certainly the multiple needs of students transcend the single need to be protected from propaganda. Perhaps this issue might be capable of bringing together divergent groups of the profession, if only to disagree. The recent debate over the national history standards suggests that America's historians might do well to think very hard about how best to reconnect scholarship with pedagogy. Were it to fail in this essential mission -- in effect a mission to convince the public that history has value and meaning -- the profession might likely revert to what Mr. Novick describes in the first pages of his thoughtful book, that is an association of amateurs.
Robert Ganem (rganem@nea.org)
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