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• 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 Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and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)

• The theater of history
• Scattered lives, scattered documents : writing liberation history
• Multiple lives and lost narratives : (auto)biography as history
• The assembly of history : orations and conventions
• Our warfare lies in the field of thought : the African American
• Press and the work of history
• Epilogue : William Wells Brown and the performance of history.

As the story of the United States was recorded in pages written by white historians, early-nineteenth-century African American writers faced the task of piecing together a counterhistory: an approach to history that would present both the necessity of and the means for the liberation of the oppressed. In Liberation Historiography, John Ernest demonstrates that African Americans created a body of writing in which the spiritual, the historical, and the political are inextricably connected. Their literature serves not only as historical recovery but also as historical intervention. Ernest studies various cultural forms including orations, books, pamphlets, autobiographical narratives, and black press articles. He shows how writers such as Martin R. Delany, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs crafted their texts in order to resituate their readers in a newly envisioned community of faith and moral duty. Antebellum African American historical representation, Ernest concludes, was both a reading of source material on black lives and an unreading of white nationalist history through an act of moral imagination.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Viola Florence Barnes was one of the most prominent women historians in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s. Born in 1885, Barnes was educated at Yale University and began teaching at Mount Holyoke College in 1919. She was an instrumental member of the 'imperial school' of historians, who interpreted North American colonial history within a British imperial framework. Specializing in New England and Canada's Maritime provinces, her best-known book was The Dominion of New England, published in 1923. In this probing biography, John G. Reid examines Barnes's life as a female historian, providing a revealing glimpse into the gendered experience of professional academia in that era. Reid also examines the imperial school, which, although rapidly losing favour by the 1950s, had yielded results that were crucial to the study of North American colonial history. Viola Florence Barnes was cited as one of 100 'outstanding career women' in the United States in 1940. The later years of her life were marked by difficulty and disillusionment, as she tried in vain to have her last book published. Yet, despite retiring in 1952, Barnes remained an active scholar almost to the time of her death in 1979. This exhaustive work is the first biography of Barnes - a major figure in the study of North American history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface
• Introduction
• I : Tracing unities
• Hanging together : divergent unities in American history ; America in person : the evolution of national symbols ; Rediscovering the pragmatic American
• Specialization in a democracy
• II : Integrating diversity
• Integrating America : the problem of assimilation at the turn of the century ; Immigration and American mythology ; Pluralistic integration as an American model ; Three postwar reconstructions
• III : Turning points
• From boundlessness to consolidation : the transformation of American culture, 1848-1860 ; America's utopian prophets ; Reorientation of American culture in the 1890s ; Long road to the New Deal
• IV : Prospects
• Multiculturalism and universalism : a history and critique ; Future of American history.

How has America, with its many ethnic, class, and ideological divisions, allowed divergent groups to "hang together" as Americans? In this book, a distinguished historian explores the ways in which Americans have conceived of a national identity and demonstrates that an appreciation of America's kaleidoscopic diversity can be reconciled with an affirmation of its common national culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)