SOURCE: Degler, Carl. Review of That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. Journal of American History 76, no. 3 (December 1989): 892-94.

In the following review, Degler praises That Noble Dream as “brilliant,” noting that Novick's central argument is presented with “force, understanding, and subtlety.”

Do historians in the United States care about “the objectivity question”? Peter Novick does not think they do, but that is precisely why he has written this book [That Noble Dream] “to provoke my fellow historians” (he is a historian of France at the University of Chicago) “to greater self-consciousness of our work; to offer those outside the historical profession a greater understanding of what we're up to.” His way of achieving this goal is a brilliant, if closely argued, wide-ranging history of the transformations in the concept of objectivity in the profession from its founding in the 1880s to the present.

Do not be misled. This...