That Noble Dream The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession

ISBN-10: 0521357454

ISBN-13: 9780521357456

Edition: 1988

Authors: Peter Novick, Lorraine Daston, Dorothy Ross, Quentin Skinner, James Tully

List price: $35.99

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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 was elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the past century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writing of hundreds of American historians, this book is a richly textured account of what American historians have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. Published…

Book details

List price: $35.99
Copyright year: 1988
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 9/30/1988
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 662
Size: 5.98" wide x 8.98" long x 1.18" tall
Weight: 2.156
Language: English

Lorraine Daston is director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and honorary professor at the Humboldt-Universitï¿½t, Berlin.Gregg Mitman is William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and professor of medical history and science and technology studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.



Preface


Introduction: nailing jelly to the wall



Objectivity Enthroned



The European legacy: Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert



The professionalization project



Consensus and legitimation



A most genteel insurgency



Objectivity Besieged



Historians on the home front



A changed climate



Professionalism stalled



Divergence and dissent



The battle joined



Objectivity Reconstructed



The defense of the West



A convergent culture



An autonomous profession



Objectivity in Crisis



The collapse of comity



Every group its own historian



The center does not hold



There was no king in Israel


Appendix: manuscript collections cited


Index