[In the following review, Cuff argues that That Noble Dream draws on a wealth of research to provide “an outstanding book of great value” for historians and readers alike.]

Can historians be objective in their work? Peter Novick uses impressive research in manuscript collections and published historical scholarship, as well as wide reading in other academic disciplines, to describe and analyse how notables within the U.S. historical profession have dealt with this question over the past one hundred years. The result is an outstanding book of great value, especially to graduate students and university teachers in the field of U.S. history.

That Noble Dream provides at once a social and intellectual history of the American historical profession; a discerning guide to several of its major historiographical controversies; and a close analysis of the epistemological assumptions of its major figures. It may also be read as a personal meditation on professing history in the 1980s.

The book's “plot,” as Novick comments, is easily summarized, but its complicated story is not easily told. In part one, which focuses on the period from the origins of the American Historical Association (A.H.A.) to World War I, Novick describes how the discipline's founders successfully established historical objectivity as the key norm of the new profession. That ideal, and the model of scientific method that informed it, held several advantages. It could be used to distinguish university-based professionals from their amateurish forebears. It could be operationalized to provide a method for training students in historical technique. It could also be appealed to as a sign scientific disinterestedness, and, as a result, as a source of ideologically neutral and hence authoritative knowledge.

In part two, Novick shows how Carl Becker and Charles Beard challenged this ideal during the interwar years. They advocated “historical relativism.” Becker's scepticism about history as science had been evident before the first war, but the challenge he represented peaked in the 1930s, symbolized perhaps by his and Beard's presidential addresses to the A.H.A.—the former's “Everyman His Own Historian” in 1931, the latter's “Written History as an Act of Faith” in 1933.

American historians had demonstrated a patriotic fervour during the first war that belied their claims for disinterested objectivity. Their subsequent failure to agree on the war's origins, despite much “objective” professional research, also shook the view that careful empirical work would somehow eventually accumulate into one objective truth. Nor could exponents of the objectivist creed find comfort in modernist current of thought in such fields as physics and psychology. Exponents of relativity and psychoanalysis implied that knowledge could not exist independent of the frames of reference, or values, or intentions of historical investigators. The interwar decline in the social status of the professoriate compounded the chastened mood.

Though shaken by the challenge, the profession's opinion-makers recovered in the 1940s, and, after partially incorporating elements of the relativist critique, boldly reasserted the promise of objective history through the cold war years. Novick traces the results in part three. Many of the historians who enlisted in the wartime Office of Strategic Services continued to move between Washington and the campus in the postwar years. Proponents of historical objectivity wielded the idea in the fight against Communist ideology. The promise of a value-free social science captured American academe. Novick quotes business historian and socialist Thomas Cochran, writing in 1951 “I guess what I've done is to build an ivory tower called the Social Science Approach to History where I can live wrapped up in social roles, and protected from reality by sanctions, basic personalities and cultural themes” (p. 325). The celebratory historiography of the nineteen fifties, and the cultural consensus it reflected, promoted confidence in the objectivity of the work produced.

By the mid-sixties, however, the world of professional historians had turned once again. The ideological consensus that under wrote the objectivist synthesis of the nineteen fifties began to unravel, and Novick discusses causes and results in part four. He offers an even-handed discussion of the emergence of left-orientated historians, particularly those from the Wisconsin History Department, and their impact on various historical controversies. He also comments insightfully on the particularistic perspectives represented by the emergence of “black” history, women's history, and public history. (The book is a helpful primer for Ph.D. comprehensives in the U.S. field). Novick is also good on intellectual currents in other disciplinary areas, such as history of science and literary theory, that chipped away at the epistemological foundations of objectivist hopes The social outcome—“every group its own historian”—enlivened debate over the meaning of the U.S. historical experience. But it has left a profession in “confusion, polarization, and uncertainty,” in matters of method and purpose; and it has rendered the idea of historical objectivity “more problematic than ever before” (pp. 16-17).

As this brief summary suggests, Novick argues that the evolution of historians' attitudes towards the objectivity question has reflected changes in social, political, cultural and professional contexts. Novick takes ideas on their own terms. He offers close scrutiny of such concepts as “pragmatism” “perspectivalism” and so on. He also attends to debates internal to the discipline itself. But shifts in conditions external to the profession hold the key to attitudinal changes within it.

Exactly how these causal factors interact Novick must leave unspecified in a broad narrative of this kind. He must also side-step the question of how representative the sensibilities of his professional notables have been of the profession as a whole. As he observes at one point, most historians in the United States, (and Canada for that matter), have had absolutely no interest in the philosophical questions that animate this study.

Novick hopes his book will raise self-consciousness among historians about the nature of their work. And this may happen. But whether it affects practice is problematic, since it remains unclear exactly how one can respond to the tough questions he poses. If That Noble Dream is any guide, moreover, any major change in the status of the objectivity question within the American historical profession will depend to a considerable extent on events that transpire outside it.