This article continues an earlier discussion of Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question in the American Historical Profession. If the collapse of liberalism and the Great Depression provided powerful motivations for insurgent historians to question the time-honored ideals of the profession, the moral certainty of the Second World War, and then by (the early  Continue Reading …

Peter Novick (1934–2012) was an American intellectual historian who is probably best remembered today for That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988.) Though controversial (then and now), it is a standard text for American graduate students in history, and is therefore worth spending some time with, both for its history and its  Continue Reading …