[In the following review, Turner asserts that That Noble Dream is itself a model for the history of an academic discipline.]

Academic sociology in the United States was born into an already thriving family of disciplines; it was the runt of a litter in which history and economics were the older siblings. History was the academic origin of such pioneer sociologists as Albion Small, and Giddings, for most of his career, had “history” in his professorial title. Yet, like rival siblings, the social science disciplines developed by defining themselves in relation to one another. Peter Novick's account of the history of American history in That Noble Dream concentrates on one of the defining differentia, the historian's concept of objectivity, and traces its shifting course of development from the era of Francis Parkman and historical amateurism to the still-simmering David Abraham affair.

The differences from sociology were quite striking. The historians of the early years of professionalization, especially from 1890 to World War I, were for the most part ultraconservative, and the great historical issue of the day was the healing of the wounds from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Differences, notably sectional differences, were buried under a gentlemanly ethos of comity (quite in contrast to the personal bitterness between the members of the founding generation of American professional sociology) that lent itself to a prosouthern bias. The German academic roots of the founding “professional” historians made the discovery of a long series of continuous institutional developments a standard theme and, under the influence of the problem of national healing, led to the brief dominance of “Anglo-Saxonism,” the doctrine of the ancient Teutonic origins of the distinctive political and juridical institutions of the United States and England. “Objectivity” was equated with fidelity to the sources and with an often-expressed horror of “philosophy of history.” (The rejection of the philosophy of history was a spur to the creation of a sociological society; “Anglo-Saxonism” in heterodox forms was essential to the background of several early American Sociological Society presidents.)

World War I sharpened “a most genteel insurgency” by the younger generation of James Harvey Robinson, James Shotwell, Carl Becker, and Charles Beard, who challenged the ideal of objectivity (particularly the idea that the historian could, by attending closely to the sources, become free from bias). The excesses of war propaganda, in which historians actively engaged, put paid to this idea and also reminded historians of the importance of history in the schools and the need for a usable past. Thus in the 1920s, as the rest of the social sciences, especially sociology, became objectivist and hyperempiricist, many “Progressive” historians became skeptical and mildly relativistic about historical truth. The professoriat in general was in the doldrums; the relative purchasing power of academic salaries dropped, as did the quality of students and the quality of the positions in which they were placed. Regional academic markets developed, dominated by departments such as Chicago's, and a kind of bland, back-scratching “professionalism” took hold. Yet the 1920s were enlivened by a bitter dispute over the “war-guilt problem,” in which Harry Elmer Barnes, wearing his historian's cap, was a leading “revisionist” figure. Comity also broke down over the standard picture of slavery, as Progressive historiography assaulted the older prosouthern views of the peculiar institution.

The “relativism” promoted by Beard and Becker defined the dispute over objectivity in the interwar period. Fascism, at the end of the period, discredited it: “war admits of no relativism,” as one writer put it in 1940. The Cold War was equally uncongenial to historical relativism, and this, combined with the intervention of foundations and the CIA to prevent a revisionist dispute over World War II and the consequent anathematizing of academic “isolationists,” many of whom continued to oppose the expanding American world role, led to a “consensus” historiography of American history dominated by former leftists, such as Richard Hofstader, who had moved Right. The consensus these writers developed on American history was much the same as Parsons's, and shared such idiosyncrasies as his intense antipopulism. It was very much a history congenial to the attitudes of urban northeasterners: “asphalt-oriented” as one critic put it (p. 340). The McCarthy era both inspired and reinforced these developments. Major topics such as the Civil War were neglected, and the problem of race was resolved by consensual antiracism. History became intensely professionalized, captive student audiences replaced the larger public as the primary audience, Ph.D. production increased, internal technical questions became dominant, methodological disputes such as the relativism dispute of the 1930s were not pursued, and history as an autonomous, universalistically oriented profession was made secure.

Then the 1960s and the Vietnam War came. Radical historians challenged many of the tenets of consensus historiography, and this challenge combined with the ordinary give-and-take of historical analysis and the availability of new documents to undermine the standard view of Cold War origins and the optimistic version of American history that was key to the older consensus. Out of all this came several kinds of fragmentation. One was the racial and gender particularism of historians who claimed that only blacks could understand the black historical experience, and women who claimed that the history of women should both serve feminism and reflect distinctive nonmale cognitive styles. Another was the result of the rise of history for hire, “public history” paid for or otherwise sponsored and controlled by organizations that wanted their histories written. A third was the particularism that arose between historical paradigms, especially the methodological paradigms of quantification and textualism. A fourth was rampant specialization. The present situation is summed up by the title of one of Novick's last chapters: the center did not hold. The current situation is one that sociologists should find familiar. The machine of text production grinds on, “standards” are more or less upheld but not seriously examined, but the sense of an enterprise with a common purpose has vanished.

This story should be of special interest to historians of sociology, in part because of the peculiar bond of siblinghood. Just as comparisons between national sociological traditions reveal the distinctive, but usually unnoticed, solutions to generic problems that constitute particular sociologies, cross-disciplinary comparisons reveal the distinctive responses to great national events, such as the two world wars and the differences in conception of such common problems as objectivity, which is the theme of Bannister's recent history of the interwar years in American sociology. The text itself is a model history of disciplines, but it is also written in an engaging informal style. Anyone with an interest in history as a discipline will find it an enjoyable read.