SOURCE: Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. “Peter Novick and the ‘Objectivity Question’ in History.” Academic Questions 8, no. 3 (summer 1995): 17-27.

In the following essay, written as a summary of a talk Turner gave at a panel titled “History: “As It Really Was?” Turner asserts that a major weakness of Novick's That Noble Dream is his failure to make some essential distinctions in his use of the term “objectivity.” Turner also comments that Novick's dire assessment of the state of modern historical scholarship is inaccurate.

Author's note: Like most of the historians I have encountered in my lifetime, I have always found what happened in the past more interesting than those who write about it. I therefore rarely spend time reading books about historians. But when I learned that Peter Novick had agreed to participate in the panel, I decided I should look at his book, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity...