That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Ideas in Context, Series Number 13)

Cambridge University Press, 1988. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. 8vo - over 7. Cambridge University Press, 1988, First Edition. Soft Cover. Very Good Condition. Clean, tight, solid book with faint marks on page fore-edge, internals completely unmarked. Drawing on the published writings and unpublished correspondence of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Eugene Genovese, Peter Novik gives the reader an account of what American historians have thought they were doing, or ought to be doing, when they wrote history and how their principles influenced their practice and how practical exigencies influenced their principles. A provocative account of how the historical profession in America has dealt with its founding myth and central norm. Part One deals with the years from the founding of the profession to World War i; Part Two with WWI and interwar years; Part Three with WW II and the Cold War; and Part Four the years since the 1960s and is a story of the cultural, political and professional influences that caused the collapse of the post war synthesis that led to todays period of confusion, polarity and uncertainty. 648 pages. Manuscripts cited. Index. 9 x 6". 1988, Cambridge University Press