[In the following essay, written as a summary of a talk Turner gave at a panel titled “History: “As It Really Was?” Turner asserts that a major weakness of Novick's That Noble Dream is his failure to make some essential distinctions in his use of the term “objectivity.” Turner also comments that Novick's dire assessment of the state of modern historical scholarship is inaccurate.]

Author's note: Like most of the historians I have encountered in my lifetime, I have always found what happened in the past more interesting than those who write about it. I therefore rarely spend time reading books about historians. But when I learned that Peter Novick had agreed to participate in the panel, I decided I should look at his book, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession,¹ which is about historians, as opposed to about history as most understand that word. Even though Novick reneged on that commitment by withdrawing from the panel shortly before it was to take place, what I found in his book struck me as sufficiently disturbing to merit extended remarks. What follows here is based on those portions of my talk that bore on Novick's book.

In citing Leopold von Ranke's famous formulation, wie es eigentlich gewesen, Peter Novick, like many others who have invoked it, ignores the rest of the sentence in which those words appeared. He therefore deprives them of much of their original meaning. Ranke wrote that sentence in the preface to his first book, which deals with the histories of the Latin and Germanic peoples in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His full sentence reads, in the first edition of the book: “The study of history has been assigned the task of judging the past, of instructing the world of today for the benefit of future years. The present attempt does not presume to such lofty functions. It merely wants to say how it really was.”¹ As this reveals, the main thrust of Ranke's sentence consisted of a declaration of independence for the discipline of history. He was asserting its autonomy from theology and philosophy, to which it had previously been subordinated. When he eschewed passing judgment on the past, Ranke was rejecting the moralizing use of history that prevailed during the early nineteenth century. When he rejected the proposition that history should provide a guide to the future, he was rejecting the enlistment of the past in a philosophical system that would provide a teleological key to the future, an undertaking on which Hegel was then busy. One of Ranke's great contributions was thus to teach that, in order to function properly, the discipline of history must be free, that it should not be subordinated to some other purpose.

Those who, like Novick, quote only the final four words of Ranke's famous sentence do catch part of its meaning. As those words indicate, Ranke announced his intention to strive for a view of the past that would correspond as closely as possible with what had actually been. As Novick and many others have failed to notice, however, “getting it right” represented for Ranke not a realized achievement but rather an ideal, a goal toward which the historian must aspire even though it could never be fully attained. He professed only to want—in the sense of seeking—to show how the past had actually been; he did not contend he had succeeded. As someone conversant with the works of Immanuel Kant, Ranke was far too aware of the limitations of human knowledge to lay claim to such an exalted achievement. A few pages after the famous passage, he wrote yearningly of his ideal, “to capture the event itself in its human comprehensibility, in its unity, in its completeness,” only to add in humility: “I know how far short of it I have fallen. One exerts oneself, one strives, in the end one has not attained it.”²

Fundamental to Novick's [That Noble Dream] is his contention that the historians who shaped the professional study of the past in the United States got off to a false start as a consequence of “their almost total misunderstanding” of Ranke (26). Mistaking him for an empiricist, they arrived, according to Novick, at a spurious notion of objectivity that long hobbled American historians until recent times, when more perceptive minds liberated themselves from such illusions. As Novick portrays him, Ranke was anything but an empiricist. He was instead a “thoroughgoing philosophical idealist” (27).

There is some truth to this, but Novick throws out the empiricist baby with the philosophical bath water. Ranke was indeed very much a man of his time whose values and worldview were shaped by a combination of Lutheran piety, idealism, and romanticism. He looked for deeper meaning in history and believed that the study of the past could allow one to detect, or at least glimpse, the movement of God's hand in human affairs. But what Novick omits to mention is that Ranke also insisted upon an empirical foundation for that quest. He believed the historian could find divine fingerprints only by first reconstructing the past with the utmost detachment and objectivity. His goal was to prevent the historian from imposing extraneous views on the past, from distorting in any way the true pattern of the past, wie es eigentlich gewesen. For only that could reveal, or at least allow glimpses of, divine purpose. If the historian distorted the true pattern of the past, the whole endeavor would be in vain.

Novick claims that Ranke once wrote of a wish to “as it were extinguish myself.”³ If those are in fact his words, Ranke was presumably expressing his aspiration to serve as a neutral intermediary between his readers and the past, rather than, as Novick argues, reflecting “a widespread romantic desire to open oneself to the flow of intuitive perception” (28). That curious interpretation leads Novick to the arresting assertion that the

young historian who in the 1970s proposed a “psychedelic” approach to history—altered states of consciousness as a means for historians to project themselves back into the past—was thus in some respects truer to the essence of Ranke's approach than empiricists who never lifted their eyes from the documents.

(28)

Anyone even casually acquainted with Ranke's methods will recognize that proposition as ludicrous.

In pursuit of the past, the actual past, wie es eigentlich gewesen, Ranke and his school codified a set of principles for historical inquiry quite incompatible with “altered states of consciousness.” Those principles were by no means wholly of their invention; a good many had been developed earlier by philologists and other scholars. What Ranke and his school achieved was a systematization and codification into what became known as the critical method. Since the word “critical” has been stretched out of all recognition of late, I shall refer to the system of historical investigation developed by Ranke and his school as methodological objectivity. That system rests on a number of basic imperatives. It instructs historians to seek out all available evidence on the subject of inquiry, to respect the integrity of that evidence, altering nothing and omitting nothing relevant from consideration. It requires them to exercise skepticism in evaluating the evidence by subjecting it to multiple tests of authenticity and reliability. It calls upon historians to identify the sources of their evidence so that others may scrutinize their use of it. And it enjoins them not to go beyond the evidence in reconstructing what occurred in the past.

It was these standards for methodological objectivity that the founders of the historical profession in this country took from Ranke and his school. They proved separable from Ranke's pursuit of a glimpse of God's hand as well as from the conservative historicism and moral relativism that marred his own writings. And those standards have proved quite compatible with vastly different approaches to the past and varied interpretations of it. To be sure, some historians, both in this country and elsewhere, superimposed on Ranke's method a simplistic positivism according to which the facts about the past, once they were scrupulously established, would in effect interpret themselves. That was a perversion of Ranke's position, since he himself recognized that establishing what had taken place in the past and understanding it were two distinct, if closely interrelated, tasks.⁴ The standards of methodological objectivity he championed for the first of those tasks survived the positivist vogue, however, and have stood the test of time ever since. They remain today the foundation of the modern historical profession throughout the world. Without them, historians can have no hope of rational discourse or resolution of disagreement. Without them, written history would dissolve into a cacophony of clashing opinions, none more valid than the others.

The methods developed by Ranke and his school do not guarantee agreement among historians, of course. To the contrary, historians' interpretations of the past can and do vary widely within the constraints of Rankean methodological objectivity. Novick emphasizes this in his book, which focuses on disagreements among American historians about interpretations of this country's past. Moreover, he contends that in recent times most American historians reject the possibility of arriving at an objective version of the past. I agree with him on that score but think him wrong to see this as a new development. Novick makes this latter-day skepticism appear novel by contrasting it with the vogue of “scientism” that led some of the early professional historians of this country to believe a century or so ago that they could aspire to achieve an objective interpretation of the past acceptable to all. That was, however, like positivism, a comparatively brief episode. The serious study of history promotes humility and skepticism, and “scientism” soon wilted in the face of the disagreements among historians of the United States about how to interpret their country's past.

American historians have long since emancipated themselves from the “scientist” proposition that the historical record is a kind of unitary, harmonious tapestry that individual practitioners reverentially embellish by adding the threads of their research. They recognize that it is an ongoing conversation about the past, which sometimes gives rise to arguments, even to quarrels. Consensus develops on various issues and reigns for a time, only to dissolve under challenges arising from fresh evidence and revisionist interpretations. The great Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, effectively illustrated this when he examined what French historians wrote about Napoleon Bonaparte throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Geyl found wide fluctuations in evaluations of Bonaparte's career. During the dull and stodgy Bourbon restoration, glorification of his career prevailed. When his nephew, Napoleon the Third, reimposed dictatorial rule on France, negative assessments predominated. During the prosaic Third Republic, Bonaparte's triumphs again seemed attractive to French historians.⁵

At first sight, Geyl's findings might appear to demonstrate that history is an exercise in relativism, with every generation of historians writing what pleases it and no one to say who is right. Geyl did not draw that conclusion, however. Instead, he saw an ongoing advance in knowledge about the actual past. “Frenchmen are bound to differ about the great Corsican until the end of time,” he observed, adding, however,

that is not to say that the argument has been and will be fruitless. It has illuminated much that was dark, it has led to agreement on large tracts of that ground, and even where it has not, the points raised by each side, the suggestions and explanations about motives and character, about the immense complications in which that miraculous career was enacted, have enriched the picture. … The argument, in other words, has led to a gradual even though partial conquest of reality.⁶

Geyl's study reveals how easy it is to give the impression of rampant relativism by focusing on the biases in individual historians' interpretations of the past, as does Novick throughout his book. But if one steps back and looks at the results of the collective efforts of historians—as Geyl did but Novick fails to do—one finds a discernible advance in knowledge about the actual past emerging from the clash of interpretations, as historians challenge and correct each other's work. The professional study of history is, in other words, a slow, multi-voiced, dialogical process that eventually yields an increasingly firm grasp on the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. That process can function, of course, only in the presence of two indispensable prerequisites. First, and most basically, historians must be free to express their own views. And second, they have to abide by the methodological objectivity that Ranke and his school bequeathed to the world. In the absence of the latter, there can be no shared foundation for the communication and criticism that are the essential ingredients of progress in the effort to recapture and comprehend the past.

Although Novick's subtitle focuses on what he calls the “objectivity question,” his book makes it difficult to establish where he stands on that subject, since he wraps himself in a cloud of equivocation. On just one page of the introduction to his book the reader encounters the following statements:

What I can't do is hope to satisfy those who exigently demand to know if I am “for” or “against” objectivity. I don't think that the idea of historical objectivity is true or false, right or wrong. … Many philosophical assumptions of the concept seem to me dubious; some of the key elements in the objectivist synthesis I consider psychologically and sociologically naive. … It seems to me that to say of a work of history that it is or isn't objective is to make an empty observation; to say something that is neither interesting nor useful … in general and on the whole, I have been persuaded by the arguments of the critics of the concept; unimpressed by the arguments of its defenders.⁷

Despite this barrage of obfuscation, Novick's book seems to me to make it abundantly clear that he believes the idea of historical objectivity is and always has been an illusion. His book, therefore, reminds me of nothing so much as the ancient Greek riddle: “What is an Athenian to believe when a Cretan tells him all Cretans are liars?” Here is an elaborately documented 629-page volume—891 footnotes drawing on 60 manuscript collections, dozens of articles and books—the thesis of which is that we cannot trust what we read in such books written by historians.

The fundamental deficiency of Novick's treatment of the “objectivity question” lies in his failure to make some essential distinctions. First of all, he conflates two very different forms of objectivity: process and product. By objectivity in terms of process I mean the application of methodological objectivity to the study of the past. By objectivity in terms of product I mean the notion, to which I have already referred, that there can be an objective version of the past. Insofar as historians in this country ever subscribed to such a notion, it has long since been a thing of the past. Yet, by citing the rejection of that sort of objective product by numerous American historians, Novick erroneously assumes that he has also demonstrated their rejection of objectivity in the process of researching and writing about the past. I do not find evidence in his book to support that view. He deals almost exclusively with what some American historians have said about clashing interpretations of the past. If he had examined how they researched and wrote their histories, he would have found that all those who merited the title of historian sought to practice objectivity in the sphere of process.

A second source of confusion in Novick's book arises from his conflation of objectivity and neutrality. In a perceptive review of Novick's book, Thomas Haskell has observed that Novick equates partisanship—advocacy—with the rejection of objectivity.⁸ Yet as Haskell points out, as long as methodological objectivity is adhered to, advocacy—partisanship—is not incompatible with objectivity. This is, I think, a distinction that guides the practice of all good historians. Certainly, in everything that I have taught and written about German history of the twentieth century, I have left no doubt that I regard Nazism as a despicable doctrine and the Third Reich as a criminal regime. That, surely, is not neutrality. But such partisanship does not prevent me from attempting to adhere in my scholarship and teaching to the methodological objectivity that Ranke and his school bequeathed us. To do otherwise, I know, would render my work worthless.

As a result, in considerable part, of his failure to distinguish between objectivity in process and in product or between objectivity and neutrality, Novick arrives (628) at what amounts to an obituary for the historical profession of the 1980s in America:

As a broad community of discourse, as a community of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist. Convergence on anything, let alone a subject as highly charged as the “objectivity question,” was out of the question. The profession was as described in the last verse of the Book of Judges:

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

If, as Novick contends, historians in this country no longer share any standards, they have no claim to constituting a profession. Although it is conspicuously missing from Novick's definition of a profession (48), a commitment to uphold a set of commonly agreed upon standards of competence is a cardinal component of the usual definitions of a profession. Fortunately, Novick is wrong not only about the nature of professions in general but also about the current state of the historical profession in this country. He arrives at his apocalyptic conclusion by generalizing from a handful of egregious but quite atypical deviations from the norms of the profession. The overwhelming majority of America's historians still strive to uphold the standards of Rankean methodological objectivity in their works. Novick's melodramatic obituary lacks, in short, a corpse.

This is not to say there is no cause for concern about the state of the historical profession in this country. The most useful feature of Novick's book is its documentation of what appears to be an increasing willingness on the part of a few to abandon the independence so laboriously achieved for the discipline of history by Ranke and others during the last century. Some American historians seem quite ready, that is, to subjugate their discipline to the pursuit of what they regard as worthy causes. And, as so often happens when advocacy becomes the dominant motivation and the quest for a “useful” past replaces that for the actual past, the result has been the violation of the standards of methodological objectivity established by Ranke and his school. Novick provides some sobering examples of this growing tendency to substitute propaganda for scholarship in the pursuit of “higher” purposes. In some cases, those who have chosen that course have invoked “post-structural” theories borrowed from other disciplines, but in other instances they have simply manipulated evidence to make it serve their purposes. Some of those purposes may be meritorious in themselves, but when the past is manipulated to advance any cause, the result is defective scholarship.

Traditionally, the historical profession in this country, as elsewhere, has rallied to reject offenses against methodological objectivity with something approaching a united front, but there are disturbing signs that we can no longer rely on this in the United States. A case in point is provided by the controversy occasioned a decade ago by the publication by Princeton University Press of a book based on the University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation of a Novick student who was then teaching in the Princeton history department. Initially proclaimed by a host of reviewers as a major breakthrough on the causes of one of the greatest catastrophes of modern history, the Third Reich, the book proved to be riddled with flagrant and multiple violations of the most fundamental tenets of methodological objectivity. As I and others acquainted with the evidence in question soon established, Novick's student had misrepresented the content of numerous documents and misquoted others, in one case omitting from a key passage the word nicht, whose absence or presence has a substantial effect on the meaning of a German sentence. He had presented loose, inaccurate paraphrases as quotations. By misdating archival documents or attributing them to the wrong persons, he had made it virtually impossible to find his sources. As was the case in his use of documents, his statistics were tendentiously manipulated. The book amounted, in short, to a clear case of pervasive disregard for the most elementary of scholarly standards.⁹

In itself, the spurious scholarship of Novick's student was not remarkable. There have always been individuals who violate the standards of professions, including history's; otherwise, there would be no need to uphold standards. Disturbing in this instance was a large-scale attempt at a cover-up mounted by other historians who sought to explain away the book's defects.¹⁰ Initially, these apologists denied that Novick's student had done anything seriously wrong. When overwhelming evidence to the contrary made that position untenable, they conceded he had made “mistakes,” but pointed out that so had other historians. Some charged that his book had been subjected to undue scrutiny, contending that if those of others were examined as closely, the results would be no different. Some argued that the author's interpretation was so significant that it deserved respect regardless of his misuse of the evidence on which it was purportedly based. Others sought to change the subject from competence to motive. They maintained that as long as it had not been proved that the author had acted intentionally what he had done was not so serious, neglecting, however, to explain how intention can be established in the absence of a signed confession. Some saw the absence of plagiarism as a mitigating factor, overlooking that the plagiarist injures only the one author whose work is stolen, whereas the dissemination of falsified evidence can harm the work of many. Still others sought to deflect attention from the book's defects by imputing ulterior motives to its critics. Because the author was a self-proclaimed “neo-Marxist,” McCarthyism was alleged, although the specialty of the unscrupulous Senator from Wisconsin lay in claiming to have unmasked persons who denied being Marxists. When the book's critics made the evidence on its violations of scholarly standards available to departments where the author was a candidate for appointment, some of those promoting the cover-up charged unethical conduct and called for an investigation by the American Historical Association.

What makes this cover-up effort noteworthy is that those who conducted it were not cranks from the fringes of the historical profession but senior professors at major research universities who are charged with the professional education of the next generations of historians. Their contributions to the cover-up suggest that they have been passing along some very curious standards to future practitioners. One accused the book's critics of confusing “facticity” with historical truth.¹¹ Another, who characterized the critiques of the book as a “witch hunt,” sought to exonerate the author by maligning the entire profession:

When you work in the archives, you're far from home, you're bored, you're in a hurry, you're scribbling like crazy. You're bound to make mistakes. I don't believe any historian in the Western world has impeccable footnotes. Archival research is a special case of the general messiness of life.¹²

Still another, soon thereafter to be elected president of the American Historical Association, reduced the issue to the level of an intramural peccadillo; all was well, since the author of the book had “gone back to check his archives and make correction,” much as a wayward undergraduate “makes up” a botched assignment with the permission of an indulgent instructor.¹³ None of those who participated in the cover-up expressed any concern about possible harm the book's defective scholarship might have had on the thinking and work of others who had trustingly accepted a volume published under the imprimatur of a major university press that had been in circulation for several years.

Peter Novick's own contribution to the cover-up of his student's spurious scholarship casts additional light on his standards. The ten pages of his book devoted to the case (612-21) are remarkable, if for nothing else, for a footnote in which Novick explains that the author of the book in question “was my student, and is my good friend. I do not believe that the account which follows is biased or tendentious in any of the usual senses of those words, but the reader should know at the outset that I am not at all ‘neutral’ about [the author], his persecution, or his persecutors” (612). Coming from someone whose own book denies the possibility of objectivity, this is a truly remarkable claim (vide supra: Cretan to Athenian). If one subtracts from Novick's contribution to the cover-up his efforts to belittle the “mistakes” in his student's book and his ad hominem attacks on its critics, his own position is summed up in his approving contention that the book demonstrates “the relative autonomy of the argument from details of the evidence” (617). Since evidence usually takes the form of “details,” this leaves little doubt about Novick's rejection of one of the cardinal tenets of methodological objectivity. His student's ill-fated attempt at scholarship, it seems, merely reflected the standards of the mentor.

During a panel discussion of his own book in 1990, Novick revealed still more about his views on the subject of historical methodology. When the paradox of his rejection of objectivity in a book that seems to adhere painstakingly to scholarly standards was pointed out, he announced that his efforts to abide by those standards resulted not from a belief in their efficacy but rather solely from tactical expediency:

I do indeed believe that an argument can possess “relative autonomy … from details of the evidence.” But most of my readers don't share this belief—are in fact suspicious of any such claim. How do I win over those who can be won over and make difficulties for those who, if they could conveniently do so, would like to discredit my findings and conclusions by disparaging my scholarship? The question answers itself: by the most scrupulous adherence to wissenschaftliche (sometimes confused with “objectivist”) norms. If I were addressing a French audience, I'd speak French. … If … the discipline demanded that findings be presented in sonnet form, I'd chop up what I had to say into fourteen-line chunks.¹⁴

In the course of that same panel discussion, Novick went on to identify himself as a “nihilist” and referred dismissively to historians who “are, in a sense that seems to me deluded, but not pernicious, concerned with ‘moving toward the truth’ or ‘getting it right.’”¹⁵ If a professor of surgery were to announce having come to regard “getting it right” in the operating room a delusion, there would quickly be widespread agreement among professional colleagues that he or she should seek other employment. Novick, by contrast, continues to offer to students at the University of Chicago courses designated as “history” and presumably supervises still more doctoral dissertations; in addition, he received from the American Historical Association the prestigious Alfred J. Beveridge Award for the best book written on American history from 1492 to the present.

It would be misleading to leave the impression that relativistic disregard for scholarly objectivity has become rampant among the historians of this country. Despite Peter Novick's efforts to promote that notion, such is not the case. His attempt, and those of others, to cover up bogus scholarship did not succeed in keeping his unfortunate student in the profession; the latter turned to teaching law, presumably wiser about the uses of evidence for his attempt at writing history. The critics of his faulty book were not subjected to an investigation, as some of its apologists had demanded. In his own book Novick insists that the affair “might, as a result of contingent circumstances, have turned out differently, and there were at least as many participants who voiced their hostility to hyperempiricism and neo-objectivism as there were historians who actively or tacitly embraced them, not to speak of those whose responses were governed by other considerations” (621). There, as so often, Novick falls victim to wishful thinking. The vast majority of American historians continue to believe that the past can only become accessible through the rigorous application of Rankean methodological objectivity. They do not look lightly upon violations of its principles, and they are not easily fooled, even when prominently placed members of the profession allow their own standards to lapse. Although, like Ranke himself, this country's historians fall short of the lofty goal of recapturing the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, most nevertheless work very hard at “getting it right.” And collectively they achieve considerable success in increasing our knowledge of what once actually was, even as they disagree robustly about how to interpret it.

Notes

1. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535 (Leipzig and Berlin: G. Reimer, 1824), v-vi. The German text is:

   Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beygemessen: so hoher Ämter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will bloβ sagen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.

   In the second edition, published fifty years later, Ranke replaced “sagen” with “zeigen.” The contention of Georg G. Iggers, accepted by Novick (Dream, 28), that the word eigentlich was more ambiguous in Ranke's time than now and could also mean “essentially,” is not supported by the authoritative German dictionary of that era, the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the brothers Grimm. Felix Gilbert also rejected this translation, preferring “actually”: Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 34. Similarly, Hajo Holborn wrote, “The literal translation would be: ‘It only wants to show what actually occurred.’ But a more correct rendering would be: ‘It wants merely to reconstruct the actual past.’” Holborn, History and Humanities (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 90.

2. Geschichten, viii.

3. Novick attributes the quoted words to “the preface of the World History” but provides no citation (Dream, 28). None of the English translations of Ranke's works bears such a title, however. The Vorrede of his nine-volume Weltgeschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883) contains no such wish, nor does the preface to the one volume translated into English under the title Universal History.

4. See the Vorrede in the first volume of his Weltgeschichte, ix.

5. Peter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1949).

6. Geyl, Use and Abuse of History (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1955), 70f.

7. Novick, Dream, 6.

8. “Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream,” History and Theory, vol. 29 (1990), 130-57.

9. The controversy about the book, which was published in 1981, began with disclosure of some of its most glaring defects in The American Historical Review, vol. 88 (October 1983): 1143-49. The most comprehensive catalog of the book's violations of scholarly standards is Ulrich Nocken, “Weimarer Geschichte(n),” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 71 (1984): 505-27. See also Central European History, vol. 17 (September 1984): 159-293, and “A Scholarly Exchange,” Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, vol. 23, no. 9 (December 1985): 20-21.

10. See “History and Ethics: A Dispute,” The New York Times, 23 December 1984, 1; “Stormy Weather in Academe,” Time, 14 January 1985, 59; “Brouhaha over Historian's Use of Sources Renews Scholars' Interest in Ethics Codes,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 February 1985, 1; “Association Accused of Suppressing Criticism of a Controversial Study of Weimar Republic,” ibid., 25 September 1985, 5; “Footnotes to History,” The Nation, 16 February 1985; and Radical History Review, no. 32 (March, 1985): 75-96. The cover-up effort resumed when a ‘revised edition’ of the book was published in 1986 by a commercial house after Princeton University Press declined to reissue it: Volker Berghahn, “Hitler's Buddies,” The New York Times Book Review, 2 August 1987. The revisions failed, however, to correct the book's defective scholarship: Peter Hayes, “History in an Off Key,” Business History Review, vol. 61 (Autumn 1987): 452-72. My own analysis may be found in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 37 (1989), 538-44.

11. Carl E. Schorske, quoted in “History and Ethics: A Dispute,” The New York Times, 23 December 1984.

12. Lawrence Stone, quoted in “Footnotes to History,” by Jon Wiener, The Nation, 16 February 1985, 180.

13. Natalie Zemon Davis, “About Dedications,” Radical History Review, no. 32 (March 1985): 95f. In this piece, Davis accused critics of the book of attacking its dedication, although none of the critiques contained any such attacks.

14. Novick, “My Correct View on Everything,” The American Historical Review, vol. 96 (June 1991): 701.

15. Ibid., 702.