SOURCE: Smith, Daniel Scott. “Noble Dream, Dead Certainties, Sophomoric Stance: Historical Objectivity for Adults.” Historical Methods 26, no. 4 (fall 1993): 183-88.

In the following review, Smith compares That Noble Dream to Simon Schama's Dead Certainties.

“Pure objectivity is a will-o'-the-wisp,” warns Simon Schama, a prolific historian of Western Europe, and “chasing it is insanity” (MacNeille 1991, 3). Implicitly endorsing the central theme of Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, a massive treatment of the professional context and political milieu of the academic study of history in the United States, Schama was commenting here on his motivation for mingling fact and fiction in Dead Certainties, two accounts connected by the thinnest of circumstance. Francis Parkman, historian of the first episode—General James Wolfe's death in the Battle of Quebec in 1759—was also the nephew of George Parkman, a physician and speculator, whose murder in 1849 set in motion the other action: the arrest, trial, conviction...