That noble dream : the "objectivity question" and the American historical profession /
Peter Novick.
- Cambridge [England] : Cambridge University Press, [(c)1988.]
- 1 online resource (xii, 648 pages)
- Ideas in context .
- Ideas in context. .
Includes bibliographies and index.
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.
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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writing of hundreds of American historians, this book is a richly textured account of what American historians have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.
9781107266773 1107266777
Historiography--United States. Objectivity. Objetividad.