SOURCE: Higham, John. Review of That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. Journal of Modern History 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 353-56.

In the following review, Higham compares Novick's central argument in That Noble Dream to the thesis of his own book History.

The title of Peter Novick's big, compelling book [That Noble Dream] comes from a bleak address that Theodore Clarke Smith delivered to the American Historical Association in 1934. Responding to sledgehammer attacks that progressive scholars were making on “the ideal of the effort for objective truth,” Smith suggested gloomily that the way things were going this “noble dream”—the basic creed of the historical profession—might in the coming decades be irretrievably lost. While making no such prediction himself, Novick nonetheless casts his monumental story of change and challenge as a pattern of decline. From about 1910 to the present the ideal of objectivity has undergone increasing attenuation and seems now...