SOURCE: Woodward, C. Vann. “Truth and Consequences.” New Republic 200, no. 8 (20 February 1989): 40-3.

In the following review of That Noble Dream, Woodward questions Novick's success in addressing the “objectivity question” and offers his own evaluation of historians' duty to represent the past.

A thesis, or better a theme, does run in and out of this large volume from beginning to end. It is proclaimed in its title, That Noble Dream, borrowed from Charles A. Beard, who used it for one of two essays renouncing faith in objectivity in historiography. As developed here, the theme deserves attention on its own, and I shall return to it later. But it is also used as an idea around which to organize an informal history of the American historical profession. Since the latter is of more general interest, I shall take it up first.

It was only in the 1880s that academics set...