SOURCE: Kedar, Alexander. Review of That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. Poetics Today 11, no. 3 (1990): 717-18.

In the following review, Kedar praises That Noble Dream as an excellent work of intellectual history, noting the volume's “extraordinary range of scholarship.”

For Peter Novick, telling the story of the “noble dream” of historical objectivity [in That Noble Dream] was like “nailing jelly to the wall” (1). With much erudition and humor, Novick has achieved an impressive account that keeps a great deal of this fuzzy stuff in place. In this long, dense, and massively documented book, Novick traces the paths of the idea of objectivity in history within the American historical profession from its foundation in the 1880s until the present. He substantiates his multicausal argument that “the evolution of historians' attitudes on the objectivity question has always been closely tied to changing social, political, cultural, and professional contexts” (628) with an extraordinary...