SOURCE: Smith, Daniel Scott. “Noble Dream, Dead Certainties, Sophomoric Stance: Historical Objectivity for Adults.” Historical Methods 26, no. 4 (fall 1993): 183-88.

[In the following review, Smith compares That Noble Dream to Simon Schama's Dead Certainties.]

“Pure objectivity is a will-o'-the-wisp,” warns Simon Schama, a prolific historian of Western Europe, and “chasing it is insanity” (MacNeille 1991, 3). Implicitly endorsing the central theme of Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, a massive treatment of the professional context and political milieu of the academic study of history in the United States, Schama was commenting here on his motivation for mingling fact and fiction in Dead Certainties, two accounts connected by the thinnest of circumstance. Francis Parkman, historian of the first episode—General James Wolfe's death in the Battle of Quebec in 1759—was also the nephew of George Parkman, a physician and speculator, whose murder in 1849 set in motion the other action: the arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of John White Webster, a Harvard chemistry professor.

Under the rubric of objectivity, Novick includes the emphasis on “the reality of the past; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and above all between history and fiction” (1-2). Following the ideal of objectivity, the historian acts as a neutral judge who has no prior investment in reaching any particular conclusion. The historian's loyalty is to “‘the objective historical truth,’” an orientation policed by other professional historians sharing that norm (2-3). The competing view, called subjectivity or relativism, is not an independent position but a dissent from or critique of one or more of the set of objectivist beliefs.¹

Both works have attracted considerable comment, favorable and unfavorable. The American Historical Association awarded Novick its annual Beveridge Prize for the outstanding work in American history, and scholarly journals have featured lengthy critical discussions of That Noble Dream by other experts in the field of intellectual history (Kloppenberg 1989; Haskell 1990; Hexter et al. 1991). Schama currently is the most visible historian present in the pages of the New York Times, which published two reviews (Lehmann-Haupt 1991; Lewis 1991) of Dead Certainties as well as two reports on the views of its author (Bernstein 1991; MacNeille 1991). In its Magazine, Schama has recommended exciting narratives as the solution to disparate problems of history in American culture—the woeful factual ignorance of Harvard seniors majoring in history; the bland, episodic, and incoherent texts for secondary schools that are written by teams of authors and approved by committees constrained to offend none; and narrow, arid academic history, illustrated by the articles in scholarly journals and by footnote fetishism (Schama 1991). In a leading intellectual publication, Dead Certainties garnered a review hostile to its fictional aspects (Wood 1991).

It is easy to discern why Novick's volume gained the attention of intellectual historians. A historical study of the professors of history by a professor of history has obvious relevance for the professors of history who specialize in such matters. Resting on a prodigious reading of the programmatic statements of historians and their unpublished correspondence, That Noble Dream has saved many passionate sentiments, ancient quarrels, and obscure incidents from perishing from the academic earth. If you want to know what Samuel Flagg Bemis privately thought about the New Deal or what were the issues in the controversial 1969 business meeting of the American Historical Association, this is the place to look. Only a scholar devoted to academic history could have the patience to undertake the research so thoroughly recounted, even though Novick is irreverent and reports on more than a few incidents that evince pettiness, bigotry, or hysteria.

Novick pays some attention to the two largest professional societies, the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) (formerly Mississippi Valley Historical Association), preferring the engaged, left-liberal orientation of the OAH to the stodgier professional style of the AHA. The treatment of history by economists, sociologists, and other social scientists is not germane to his inquiry. No mention is made of the Social Science History Association, possibly deservedly, because its distinctiveness depends on the subjects studied and methods employed rather than on the motivations of its members for doing history in the first place.

Novick's main focus is on historians employed by the major graduate programs in the discipline. The strengths and weaknesses of the volume are those of intellectual history as currently practiced in the United States. Novick is effective in placing the evolution of research-oriented academic history in the last century into general climates of opinion inside and outside the universities. Other commentators have noted the evenhandedness with which Novick lays out various viewpoints in controversies and have called attention to the apparent irony of “objectivity” exhibited by an author who finds the ideal meaningless. Underlying what Novick terms his “historicist” approach is his belief that all viewpoints are profoundly shaped by historical circumstances. Hence there can be no right or wrong perspectives. How to justify the writing of history is all a matter of taste, so the history of that enterprise resembles other topics in the history of fashion. To use another analogy, sometimes the mood is to prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate; at other times, this preference within the ice-cream eating population reverses. Novick is not interested in, indeed would question the possibility of, developing a science or esthetics of taste, whether in historical writing or flavor preference.

An important difference exists between defining the problem as what historians have thought about the nature of history rather than what is the nature of history. The sources for an investigation of the latter are the actual histories they write. For this second subject, the ideas, concepts, and methods authors used in their historical studies become central. For example, although Novick mentions the economic historian Robert Fogel on several occasions, he omits any reference to the controversy over counterfactual propositions used by Fogel and others in the attempt to illuminate one course of history by systematic contrast with another that did not happen. In another definition of the subject, the juxtaposition of one historical record seemingly grounded in the words and numbers of the past with an imagined alternative, however systematic, would illuminate important aspects of the meanings of “objectivity.” Similarly, Novick covers Eugene Genovese's role and positions in several controversies but does not refer to the essentialism that is the most pronounced feature of his writings on Southern history. In Genovese's Marxism, deciding how to categorize the South comes close to being identical with interpreting Southern history, a taxonomic orientation that strikes this non-Hegelian as peculiar.

These comments are unfair to Novick's intentions as an intellectual historian, for he is far more interested in the producers of history, especially as political beings, than in their historical products. Indeed, elsewhere, in a flippant, playful response to his critics, Novick (1991, 700) claims that the history written by relativists and objectivists is, with a few minor exceptions, indistinguishable in practice. Even beyond its historicist evenhandedness, That Noble Dream is thoroughly conventional in method. In a brief footnote (8) that many Historical Methods readers will find amusingly native, he reports that he abandoned a quantitative study of the evaluative language of historians in thousands of book reviews because nothing intelligible appeared between the language used and such variables as age and field of the author.² Instead of being disheartened by the lack of positive results, presumably meaning the failure to reject null hypotheses of no differences, Novick might have explored other possibilities: that the use of distinctive language does not differentiate among subcommunities, a finding potentially worrisome for conventional intellectual history; or that all academic historians, for whatever reasons, form a single community with respect to the issues by which Novick defined his subject, suggesting possibly that he needed to reformulate his conception.

Novick (540) concurs in rejecting the view of the philosopher Richard Rorty's freshman, who asserts “that two incompatible opinions on important topics are equally good”; but Novick would also join Schama (322) in accepting “the rather banal axiom that claims for historical knowledge must always be fatally circumscribed by the character and prejudices of its narrator.” Not a hypothetical freshman, I think that the more interesting issues for delineation and discussion should be the criteria that can be used to choose between incompatible opinions (logical coherence, parsimony, and congruence to empirical data have all been suggested) or, better, how to arrive at a formulation that subsumes both previous competing views.

Historical publications, as Schama has put it in his sophomoric axiom, do perish. So what? No longer a banal sophomore, I think it is quite possible to discern and, if need be, to adjust mentally for the prejudices of other historians. I am rather more engaged by Schama's use of fiction as well as by other imaginative devices and clever schemes to do history than by his dark worries about fatal circumscriptions.

Still, historians should be open to Dead Certainties as an imaginative step toward escaping from the bounds that have resulted from the exaggeration and reification of the rules of objectivity. As noted above, Novick's definition of objectivity includes a stress on the distinction between fact and fiction. Indeed, it is the mixing of these elements by Schama that most disturbed Wood (1991). This objection would be more compelling if the proponents of postempirical history were to gain greater support for the assertion that a line between fact and fiction cannot be drawn effectively.

If such efforts are to be more than an occasional foray, historians reviewing them will likely be stumbling about for some time before arriving at useful criteria for making judgments. What can historians who are unpracticed literary critics say about literary devices used to enhance the understanding or appreciation of history? My judgments on Schama's two episodes are based necessarily on inchoate tastes in literature but more systematic and settled views about history.

Schama's claims for the implications of his accounts for objectivity in the writing of history are the least successful dimension of Dead Certainties, a flaw particularly marked in his treatment of the murder case. Who or what, one must ask, put the Un- in the parenthetical Unwarranted Speculations on the title page? Not the criminal law or the jury that in 1850 operated under a test for conviction of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The extremist criterion of Absolute Certainty that Schama rails against plays a small role in the actual world of human affairs. Not most of the ambiguous or contradictory evidence in the case, as, for example, with the seemingly reliable witnesses who swore they saw Dr. Parkman walking about Boston after the time of his alleged murder. Such sightings are a commonplace occurrence; the validity of the forensic testimony identifying the dismembered victim as Parkman is far more crucial.³ Not even the oppressive weight of orthodox academic history can be blamed. In the handbook of Schama's own department, published in a period that Novick in That Noble Dream identifies as one of sharp reaction against relativism, historians are advised by the authorities at Harvard that

a judge and jury, indeed, would go mad if they had to decide cases on evidence which will often seem more than satisfactory to the historian. But there is no escape; the historian, if he is to interpret at all, will try and convict on evidence which a court would throw out as circumstantial or hearsay.

(Handlin et al. 1954, 24-25)

As Schama frames them, the implications of uncertainty in the Webster-Parkman case for historiographical objectivity are trivial or absent.

There is an Uncertainty Problem quite distinct from Schama's postmodernist musings. In my opinion, admittedly extreme among academic historians, particularly those in the mainstream, the incompleteness and messiness of the historical record are not the important sources of uncertainty in dealing with the history of an event. After an event, these do sometimes present difficulties in particularizing it adequately, much less ideally, as it actually happened, to invoke the famous Rankean rule. By particularizing, I refer to explanation when generalization (the understanding or extension of a case in the context of a broader set) is not applicable.

The more profound uncertainties arise through the absence of necessity or predetermination of the event in the first place. Using the reasonable doubt test, I am convinced that Webster killed Parkman; convicting him of murder is not quite so easy, but the evidence for premeditation seems plausible enough. On the other hand, if Webster had not been in debt to Parkman, if Parkman had not been so insistent on repayment, or if Webster could have found some other source of funds, no killing would have occurred. Alternatively and hypothetically, there were others who had a nonzero probability of terminating Parkman. A priori, the killing or murder of Parkman must be seen as possibility only. Contingencies merged, the foul deed was done, and the historian then strives to reconstruct it. In particularizing, the historian learns nothing valuable outside the chain leading to the event.

Fogel (1983, 42-43) illustrates the particularizing method of historians by comparing it with the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation of airplane crashes. Although frequently difficult—because accidents can result from a complex series of contingencies and because the crash obscures the data—the goal is to determine the cause of this singular event. Two rationales are obvious. First, an airplane that crashes closely resembles others of the same model, and it is possible that a flaw implicated in the accident could cause another; a potential lesson of this history is possible. Second, the consequences of failing to minimize the chances of future airplane disasters are substantial. These pragmatic justifications do not exhaust the scope of the approach. The outbreak of World War I deserves the most imaginative and rigorous particularizing, for it had large consequences.

By contrast, the killing of Parkman and similar events are not, for historians, typically interesting in themselves. It can be argued that a historian's research could exonerate Webster, but obviously this revisionist verdict could only restore his reputation, not rescue him from the gallows. To be sure, human interest is aroused by the unusual, including dismemberment of corpses, and Webster is the only Harvard professor in history to have been convicted, much less executed, for murder.⁴

For a historian more is needed than human interest, however compellingly bizarre. The meaning of this dimension of the action could be explored by using a recent murder case or, with even more imaginative possibilities, by writing a completely fictional murder mystery. Thus the sense of history to be conveyed must in-here in the depiction of the implications of the murder for the people who shared the past with Webster and Parkman. In this assignment, Schama is somewhat more effective (see also Thomson 1971) than in his attempt to comment on the problems of objectivity and uncertainty. In the first chapter, considering a reprieve, Governor George W. Briggs of Massachusetts mulls over the crime in the context of the weaknesses of and challenges to the Boston elite: the hunger for money and status, passionless Unitarianism, the moral issue of slavery, and the looming masses of Irish immigrants recently arrived in the Commonwealth. Schama writes well, and it is his literary skill that allows a historian-critic to accept the weaker connections along with the stronger.

A possible danger of adopting an effective literary genre is that form overwhelms function, leading to an overinterpretation of the implications of the action. Once Schama had settled on the dramatic possibilities that have made murders and criminal trials so attractive to novelists and playwrights, as a historian he then had to draw historical substance out of the drama. Parkman's murder attracted spectacular notice by the press in 1850. In the years following, other dramatic crimes would titillate the readers of the popular press. In the Parkman murder, there is less there than meets the historical eye of its literary narrator. Schama's suggestion that the crime exemplified some larger failure of Boston's elite falls well short of being persuasive. My judgment, however, involves conclusions about the collapse, subsequent to a furious burst in the 1850s, of nativism in the state, the formation of the Republican party, the role of entrepreneurs in economic development, the contribution of Mugwump reformers after the Civil War, and so on. In terms of creativity and contribution, Boston's elite at midcentury was performing quite well.

Schama's hints at larger failings of the Boston elite are worthy of reflection, and a reader need not agree with a historian to appreciate his or her work. A historian as critic must be perplexed about justifying remarks concerning the historical substance in a story told in major part simply because it is a good tale. Schama's murder story has no strong historical thesis; objections to tangential matters may only be nitpicking.

Schama's multiple perspectives on the death of General Wolfe are more stimulating. The treatment begins and concludes with an account of the Battle of Quebec by an imaginary common soldier. In between are a synopsis of Wolfe and the battle as seen mostly by the general himself, an analysis of the 1771 painting by Benjamin West of Wolfe's death and the enthralled reaction of the British public,⁵ and, finally, a sketch of the arduous struggle of the neurotic nephew, Francis Parkman, to write the history of the great contest between France and Britain for dominance in North American in the eighteenth century. All this in fewer than seventy small pages bearing large type, with the disjunction of perspectives making the effect of the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The least compelling sections are a soldier's accounts of the ascent of the cliff at Quebec and the death of Wolfe. Perhaps some of my dissatisfaction was due to my training as a professional historian. Having figured out that Schama had constructed these narratives, I could not accept them as documentary evidence. Schama was there but pretended not to be. Although the passages are short, I was impatient to finish them not so much because of their deficiencies as history but because of their weaknesses as literature.

Throughout the twentieth century, academics who have advocated the use of literary models have felt themselves on the defensive against the contention of their “scientific” colleagues within the discipline that literary treatments left something to be desired. That something was the format designed to justify or at least suggest how a writer knows what he or she claims to know. In a preface to an essay on the coming of the American Revolution, Carl Becker (1918, vii-viii) pointed to his use of the device of “telling the story by means of a rather free paraphrase of what some imagined spectator or participant might have thought or said about the matter at hand” in order to attain “the truth and effectiveness of the illusion aimed at” so that the reader can “enter into such states of mind and feeling.” The technique figures most obviously at points in the text when Becker relates the views of the “average Briton.” Historians could publish many articles in Historical Methods on how to define and analyze public opinion in Britain during the 1760s and 1770s. Becker here makes simple a complex and difficult subject in order to convey a different and higher truth to the reader. Although academic historians at the time barely noticed this volume, it is likely that they would have raised questions about the validity of such passages.⁶

Beyond my rigid training as a historian, a more general explanation exists for my inability to be a receptive member of the audience for these narratives. Although complaining about academic historians pedantically eager to condemn imaginative devices such as the “average Briton,” Becker was willing to accept a tradeoff between the demand for empirical verification and the desire to sustain the truth and effectiveness of illusions conveyed to the minds of readers. The tradeoff aside, my mind did not receive the esthetic benefit of the illusions intended in the accounts of Schama's soldier. Quite bluntly, I do not like the genre. History, specifically developments during the twentieth century, has ruined me more than overeducation as a historian has spoiled my imagination. Rarely do I read anything from beginning to end. Instead, I skip around. In the case of articles, I tend to read the abstract, if there is one, or glance at the introduction. If it is interesting, I eyeball the tables and possibly look at the conclusion. In the case of academic books, I scan the introduction or conclusion, look up a few items in the index, and then leaf through the pages. In the case of fiction, I look for striking sentences or sexy passages, maybe read the first chapter, or alternatively jump around in the text. Eventually I might get around to reading a particularly promising volume from beginning to end.

Furthermore, I lack the time to read long books. Not independently wealthy, nor an employer of a retinue of servants to take care of my nonintellectual needs, I feel pressed: classes to teach, subjects to research, data to manage, regressions to compute, papers to write and revise, missed deadlines to apologize for, one thing after another. I am not alone in this perception; other than retirees, no leisure class exists today. Works of merit that are otherwise suitable to undergraduate or even graduate classes cannot be assigned because of their inordinate bulk. For want of an analytical sensibility or a sensible editor, many readers are lost.

To be sure, lengthy history books in the narrative genre continue to have a relatively large market, and the History Book Club advertises few brief works. One suspects that readers correlate size with substance, and that they seek something of impressive bulk to hold on the beach and to rest upon their book shelf.⁷

Even if I were an independently wealthy gentleman of leisure, I would not read long books, historical or otherwise. I have been ruined more by the movies than by social science. Academic history today does not resemble work written in the nineteenth century. In several graceful essays, the late John Clive (1989) has argued that the grand narrative tradition in historical writing is valuable beyond its capacity to entertain and to transmit moral lessons. The reader, Clive suggests, can perceive the interaction between author and subject, with the time traversed since the nineteenth century permitting a perspective on history versus historian that these authors sought to obscure in the service of literary form. In this contention, Parkman, Bancroft, and Macaulay are nearly our contemporaries in sensibility. Clive's experience has not been my own, and my reading of these classic authors has consequently been limited.

Critically acclaimed novels of today diverge even more radically than historical stories from those of the last century. Writings of professional historians that aim at higher truths to be unleashed by literary style and method should not resemble the works produced in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it would seem to violate a basic understanding of historians to think that the form of expression should remain static.

There is, in sum, not a single audience either for works of history or for those that intertwine history and literature. Historical development has made them plural. A professional community of scholars insists on arguments and evidence (including footnotes) supporting an interpretation. The minority of historians oriented toward the social sciences demands that the author actively intrude in laying out models, describing data, and so on. Neither group should feel guilty about agreeing that its standards have resulted in a sound basis for scholarship and in making it difficult for those, within and beyond the ranks of professional practitioners, who would seek to bend the rules of their games.

An even larger middlebrow audience seeks factual substance, a good read, and bulk (a good “shelve”). An avant-garde of intellectuals savors unusual vision, small delights in language, concise glimpses of alternative and zany understandings of the past. Poor Schama—so much talent, such an impossible task to please all the constituencies simultaneously. What should he—and others seeking truths different from those forthcoming from the normal practices of historians—do? Clearly, not attempt everything in one work. Instead of trying to reach an undifferentiated audience in a single work, historians should emulate television and narrowcast. No scholarly journal should reject an article because it is too technical for its professional audience. Ph.D.'s in a discipline have no acceptable excuses for not keeping up with advances in techniques.

Writing history for an educated general audience is another matter. If the middlebrow public does not want to be bothered by authorial interventions concerned with method, evidence, or scholarly apparatus, it is also not ready for history written in the distinctive fictional modes of the late twentieth century. Neither will the arbiters of this audience accept a seamless merger of fictional and historical content, particularly if the fiction is radically at odds with “the facts” or “the context.”⁸ However, there is relatively little need to be concerned about this market, not can much be done about it. Supplied by competitive trade publishers, it can take care of itself.

If one recognizes that audiences differ and consequently that genres differ, the solution for experimentalists would seem to be that suggested and exemplified by the separate treatments of the death of Wolfe by Schama: disjunction, with the reader being informed as to what is going on. This suggestion recognizes the existence of individuals, products of the culture of this time and place, who both know the differences between fact and fiction and would like to play with them. It would avoid any impulse to resurrect the nineteenth-century reader with an artful web of fact and fiction. Patterned after the model provided by science fiction, short pieces—essays, sketches, or stories—rather than lengthy treatises or books would be the dominant literary form.

Notes

1. Temperamentally, I find the objectivist positions more appealing and engaging than the subjectivist critique: intellectually bolder and more challenging to sustain as propositions. Additionally, the pretense that Truth can be known is more productive of substantive statements about phenomena than a view focusing on how problematic it is to know anything. Relativist objections, on the other hand, have often seemed to me to be either fussily pedantic in tone or designed to justify some didactic moralizing, or both.

2. Can it really be that, say, older military historians in their reviews used discourse as a noun, privilege as a verb, and textured as an adjective as frequently as younger cultural historians?

3. As a research strategy, perhaps Schama should have hung out in bars with cops or assistant prosecutors in order to learn what kinds of evidence are most credible at murder trials.

4. Investigating a fatal assault at an Oxford college, Inspector Morse, the erudite, world-weary detective in the PBS Mystery series, is told by one of the academics, “Around here it's the intellectual muggers you have to watch out for.”

5. For a model, see the splendid chapters reflecting on the 1816 shipwreck of the Medusa and Theodore Gericault's painting in the novel by Julian Barnes (1989, 115-39).

6. Although Becker is one of the leading critics of objectivity treated in That Noble Dream, Novick does not discuss the literary departure in The Eve of the Revolution. The methods used in the writing of history are unfortunately outside his framework.

7. Why, for example, did Knopf decide upon the 3-by-5 1/2-inch rectangle of print on the small pages of Dead Certainties?

8. The recent vehement Op-Ed reaction to Oliver Stone's fictional reconstruction of the Kennedy assassination in JFK is a case in point. Over the years, I have been bemused by Gore Vidal, whose polemics against academic historians who criticize his novels belie his striving for approval as a competent historian.

The author thanks George Huppert for his comments on a draft of this review.

References

Barnes, J. 1989. A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Becker, C. 1918. The Eve of the Revolution: A Chronicle of the Breach with England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bernstein, R. 1991. “A Historian in the World of Fiction.” New York Times, 15 May: B4.

Clive, J. 1989. Not By Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fogel, R. W. 1983. “‘Scientific’ History and Traditional History.” In Which Road to the Past: Two Views of History, edited by Fogel and G. R. Elton, 7-70. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Handlin, O., et al., eds. 1954. Harvard Guide to American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Haskell, T. L. 1990. “Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream.” History and Theory 29: 129-57.

Hexter, J. H., et al. 1991. “AHR Forum: Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: “The Objectivity Question and the Future of the Historical Profession.” American Historical Review 96: 675-708.

Kloppenberg, J. T. 1989. “Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing.” American Historical Review 94: 1011-30.

Lehmann-Haupt, C. 1991. “History as One Puzzle After Another.” New York Times, 9 May: C21.

Lewis, R. W. B. 1991. “Call the Next Witness.” New York Times Book Review, 13 May: 3.

MacNeille, S. 1991. “We Wander about the Tombs.” New York Times Book Review, 12 May: 3.

Novick, P. 1991. “My Correct Views on Everything.” American Historical Review 96: 699-703.

Schama, S. 1991. “Clio Has a Problem.” New York Times Magazine, 8 Sept.: 30-33.

Thomson, H. 1971. Murder at Harvard. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Wood, G. S. 1991. “Novel History.” New York Review of Books 38(12): 12-16.