That noble dream : the "objectivity question" and the American historical profession
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Bibliographic Information
That noble dream : the "objectivity question" and the American historical profession
（Ideas in context / edited by Quentin Skinner (general editor) ... [et al.], 13）
Cambridge University Press, 1988
- : hard
- : pbk
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Available at 37 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and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.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: nailing jelly to the wall
- Part I. Objectivity Enthroned: 1. The European legacy: Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert
- 2. The professionalization project
- 3. Consensus and legitimation
- 4. A most genteel insurgency
- Part II. Objectivity Besieged: 5. Historians on the home front
- 6. A changed climate
- 7. Professionalism stalled
- 8. Divergence and dissent
- 9. The battle joined
- Part III. Objectivity Reconstructed: 10. The defense of the West
- 11. A convergent culture
- 12. An autonomous profession
- Part IV. Objectivity in Crisis: 13. The collapse of comity
- 14. Every group its own historian
- 15. The center does not hold
- 16. There was no king in Israel
- Appendix: manuscript collections cited
- Index.
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