• Preface-- Introduction: nailing jelly to the wall-- Part I. Objectivity Enthroned:
• 1. The European legacy: Ranke, Bacon, Flaubert--
• 2. The professionalization project--
• 3. Consensus and legitimation--
• 4. A most genteel insurgency-- Part II. Objectivity Besieged:
• 5. Historians on the home front--
• 6. A changed climate--
• 7. Professionalism stalled--
• 8. Divergence and dissent--
• 9. The battle joined-- Part III. Objectivity Reconstructed:
• 10. The defense of the West--
• 11. A convergent culture--
• 12. An autonomous profession-- Part IV. Objectivity in Crisis:
• 13. The collapse of comity--
• 14. Every group its own historian--
• 15. The center does not hold--
• 16. There was no king in Israel-- Appendix: manuscript collections cited-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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 were elaborated, challenged, modified, and defended over the last century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Eugene Genovese, That Noble Dream 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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Prologue
• 1. Industrial Society and the Imperatives of Modern History
• 2. Advancing a Progressive New History
• 3. Native Americans and the Moral Compass of History
• 4. History, Class, and Culture between the World Wars
• 5. The Myth of Consensus History Epilogue Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of this study of the past century of American historical writing. Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Ellen Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in the writing of American history. The contributions of earlier scholars, some of them outside the mainstream of the historical profession, reveal that interest in the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class has been long-standing. Whether in the Progressive era's attention to issues of class, or in the renewed concern with Native Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that over the past century historians have frequently grappled with issues that we think of today as innovative. This reinterpretation of a century of American historical writing challenges the notion that the politics of the recent past alone explains the politics of history. Fitzpatrick offers an historical perspective on heated debates, and reclaims the long line of historians who tilled the rich and diverse soil of our past.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)