SOURCE: Turner, Stephen. Review of That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 2 (September 1989): 539-43

In the following review, Turner asserts that That Noble Dream is itself a model for the history of an academic discipline.

Academic sociology in the United States was born into an already thriving family of disciplines; it was the runt of a litter in which history and economics were the older siblings. History was the academic origin of such pioneer sociologists as Albion Small, and Giddings, for most of his career, had “history” in his professorial title. Yet, like rival siblings, the social science disciplines developed by defining themselves in relation to one another. Peter Novick's account of the history of American history in That Noble Dream concentrates on one of the defining differentia, the historian's concept of objectivity, and traces its shifting course of development from the era of...