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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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writing of hundreds of American historians, this book is a richly textured account of what American historians have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.
Good, though not for everybody
| Customer Rating:   | | 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. |
How to read write and study history
| Customer Rating: | | Novick's piece is a good introduction to how history should be read, written and studied. I was assigned this book in my undergraduate historical methods course and found it to be useful in understanding why history is more complex than most people believe. Historians can not simply read one book on a subject and take as gospel. In graduate school I was assigned Mark Gilderhus' History and Historians, David Fischer's Historians' Fallacies, Davidson and Lytle's After the Fact and Richard Evans' In Defense of History which helped me continue the journey started with Novick. |
Valuable, but only with cautious scrutiny
| Customer Rating: | | This author writing about objectivity seemed to really struggle with it himself. There is so much bias present that it's difficult to discern when Novick is speaking or when he is merely "echoing" the sentiments of others. Whatever the case, he simulatenously presents a valuable, if dense, tome about the history of history while, if it's taken at face value, failing to provide a fair and equitable account of the "objective truth." |
Deliberate misrepresentation of evidence
| Customer Rating: | Deliberate misrepresentation of evidence and plagiarism are among the most grievous sins a historian may commit. Not only would this do a disservice to our understanding of the past, but of the present and even the future. Peter Novick's treatment of Charles Beard's critics is a case to these points. Just as Hofstadter and others claimed that Beard had misrepresented the evidence, a similar claim may be made that Novick has misrepresented Hofstadter's critique of Beard. In his book, That Noble Dream, The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, Novick staunchly defends Beard and Becker from their critics by attacking their credibility and dismissing the shortcomings of the progressives. Along the way Novick makes an enticing argument that History as a discipline has been fragmenting, it had been endlessly whittled down internally, and he concluded by proudly proclaiming that history is dead. And his argument is strengthened by its appearance as formal historical writing. But his provocative view of History's fragmentation, is, as Beard would say, only one interpretation. And we must attend to the particular matter of Novick's misrepresentation of Hofstadter's critique of Beard. From that, we might more clearly evaluate Novick's position. Novick not only fails to cite his use of Hofstadter's text entirely honestly, he is guilty of misrepresenting him as well. In The Progressive Historians, Turner, Beard, Parrington, Hofstadter wrote:
In 1938, when a considerable number of intellectuals were queried by the editors of the New Republic for its symposium on "Books That Changed Our Minds," Beard's name ranked second only to Veblen's (and ahead of Dewey's and Freud's) among thinkers acknowledged with gratitude, and the two titles most often mentioned by the respondents were The Theory of the Leisure Class and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. (220)
Though Novick provides the correct title for the source of this information, he nowhere suggests that the following are any but his own words:
In the 1938 New Republic symposium on "Books That Changed our Minds," Beard was ranked second only to Veblen in influence, ahead of Dewey and Freud. (240)Novick's phrasing certainly wouldn't pass "the smell test" for plagiarism in a historical writing course. He is in the very least guilty of shoddy editing (Stephen Ambrose was skewered for similar shortcomings in his work). As such, this cracks open an unpleasant door for our perception of Novick's work, namely the door of questionable credibility. Though Novick uses the form of historical writing this not presuppose that he is not inaccurate, unbiased, or unprofessional in his methodology. Indeed, his book's premise is that historians cannot be objective; hence, can we believe his is an objective representation? He misrepresented the context of Hofstadter's work and used his words as his own. Is this laudable scholarship? |
Must read for every historian
| Customer Rating: | | When a professor assigned Peter Novick's "That Noble Dream" as one of the last readings in one of my seminars, I blanched. Who, I inwardly groaned, would force students to read a book this huge in the waning weeks of the semester, a time when the heavy weight of tests, papers, and grading exams rests on your shoulders? "Look at the size of that font! How in the heck are we supposed to get through that thing in a week?" wailed a fellow sufferer, echoing what we all thought as we blearily thumbed through the book. Initial skimming seemed to confirm that this would be one of those scholarly books that take years off your life even as you promptly forget what you read a mere five minutes ago. Now, I've done some power reading during my tenure as an undergraduate and graduate student; I once cruised through Herodotus in two days and Thucycdides in even less time. You learn to accept things like this in the unnatural world of the academy. With lengthy papers due at the same time I opened this book, I decided to power stuff this one. Even now I can hear the knowing snickers of graduate students across the nation who may be reading this review, seminar hardened souls amused to no end that I actually assumed I had to READ the book. I can hear the chorus: just skim through it over the course of a few hours, learn the main argument, take a few notes, and nod sagely in class. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the end of Novick's treatment of the noble profession: I rapidly discovered that this book is brilliant; a veritable cathedral of razor sharp analysis, amazing use of primary source material, and all written with one eye firmly planted on the bigger picture. What human being is capable of this Gibbonesque treatment of the American historical profession? Apparently a University of Chicago professor with a whole lot of time on his hands, a man whose primary field of research has little to do with American history. Well, Gibbon's inspiration for his enormous masterwork came from a visit to the ruins of Rome, so why not an equally impressive history from someone working outside his field? A comprehensive summary of the book is an exercise in futility here, but I think I should take a stab at it since I am studying history and often must summarize scads of material into a few precious paragraphs. My review will be inferior anyway compared to the extremely insightful essay found below on this very page. Novick begins with an examination of the German methodologies of history---an appropriate starting point because Americans wishing to study the past on an advanced level in the nineteenth century needed to go to school in Europe---in an attempt to discover how the first generation of professional American historians approached their craft. To be sure, amateur historians like Parkman, Prescott, and Adams wrote narrative histories on such huge topics as North America, Mexico, and the early governments of the United States. But in an age where scientific methods came of age, men stood up and rejected the narratives, believing that the very same techniques could, and should, be applied to the study of history. An age of strict objectivity called for an equally rigorous impartiality in looking at the past, and the first trained historians here did so with relish. Worshipping the phrase "wie es eigentlich gewesen," or studying history "as it really was," our academic ancestors attempted to collect as much factual evidence from historical sources as possible, crafting "building blocks" of history so that in the near future men could unearth the universal truth by putting these blocks together. Amusingly, Novick discovers that the American historians misunderstood this magical phrase, that it should translate as "as it essentially is," a different ballgame altogether that means a historian should employ his intuition in his studies. Since this is the exact opposite of how our historians applied the phrase, the entire edifice of our profession balances upon a translation error! Study hard for those proficiency exams, my friends! Novick's scrupulous treatment of the succeeding years of the profession reveals metatectonic (a word that appears throughout the book, and frankly, I love it and use it whenever possible) themes, but the biggest one may be that big social changes lead to big changes in the academy. While many scholars like to think they create rather than react to societal transformations, Novick proves them wrong repeatedly. War, for example, served to bring about sea changes in how historians studied history. The nightmares unfolding at places like Ypres and the concomitant moral discord after that war led to a short period of "doubt casting" in every field of western human endeavor. Things that seemed indisputable before millions died in the mud suddenly assumed a worrisome etherealness, a hazy uncertainty that ushered in the beginnings of relativism. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, with its need for absolute convictions (Hitler and Communism bad, Us good), temporarily quashed proto-relativism in favor of consensus. We are where we are at now, in an age of unbridled relativism, "social construction," and "deconstruction" because of the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left historians. Novick outlines it all in one page after another, pages rife with the words of the historians who were there when it happened. A short review fails to relate the impressiveness of this work. There are a few omissions here, one being the pedagogical functions of history as mentioned in a previous review. The other problem concerns the shortage of information about earning credentials in the profession. For information on how much fun that process is, you need to look at Theodore Hamerow's curmudgeonly treatment of life in graduate school, "Reflections on History and Historians." |
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