Reddit mentions of That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Ideas in Context)

That Noble Dream
Peter Novick

It is a history of 20th century American professional historians and a real eye opener. One highlight: Charles Beard was the most respected historian in the country in 1940. His books were the best. His research was the tightest. People near-unanimously described him as one of the nicest people they ever met.

He became a pariah overnight because he had misgivings about the World War II project. The wikipedia article alludes to this, but if you read Novick's presentation your head will spin. And not just his telling of the Charles Beard story. The entire book is like that.

To quote Thomas Haskell, "objectivity is not neutrality." I think one can be an objective, professional historian but still engage with one's research subjects as moral beings. I certainly don't check that sentiment at the door. Whether one has moral feelings about a subject is not what is going to account for whether one is biased about it or not. I believe that one can objectively come to strong ethical or moral conclusions about a given subject.

That being said, one wants to avoid being obviously anachronistic, or incredibly stupid about doing such a thing. One wants to avoid flip judgments that rely entirely on the benefit of hindsight. One wants to avoid being overly presentist in one's approach to the past. And so on.

My general approach is to try and phrase the hard moral issues as broad questions. For example, when talking about the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima, I like to pose my thoughts as a question rather than an answer: under what conditions do we find it morally acceptable, if any, to deliberately set large civilian populations on fire? To me this dodges that standard moral approaches, and instead frames it as a general problem (personal and societal) to be solved, rather than trying to pass specific judgment on the people at the time.

That being said, that's not the primary goal of writing history. But it's hard not to meditate about such things if one is working in areas where people are (as they often are) doing quite unpleasant things to one another.

Required reading for anyone doing any kind of serious study in history is Peter Novick's _That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession_. Worth checking out if you are interested in how historians have approach this and many other questions over the last few centuries, at least in the USA. Short version: it's complicated and contested.

Oh boy, haha. Way to open Pandora's box here.

My own work is primarily on British riots, but I have a broader interest in mass movements in general. I'll recommend the book I mentioned in my comment - Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days to start. Ayers is somewhat controversial because Ayers, but that book is incredibly thought-provoking and valuable.

Less controversial but no less thought-provoking (and currently relevant considering our depressing state of climate-change denial) is Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World - it's a book about our changing perceptions of the world around us.

Finally, before I give you an 80-page list, I'm going to recommend this one. Peter Novick's That Noble Dream - I don't expect anyone but nerds like me to read this, but if more people understood the study of history itself as a constantly changing profession and philosophy (as well as science) I think the general population would see the value in it more. History isn't a static thing, and the way we approach it has changed dramatically in 150 years.

This varies, but in general, I think historians deal with bias by accepting it and understanding what a point of view brings to or detracts from a historian's work. Every historian brings a bias to the archive and the keyboard. Heck, even the selection of a research topic is indicative of some sort of bias -- why would someone devote 5-10 years of their life to a project in which they had no interest?

You will likely never find any academic work that doesn't give at least some short shrift to the side(s) with which they disagree. I don't know if it's a Quixotic quest to find one that's perfectly even, but I do think it's pointless. Embrace diverse opinions and read many works on the same subject. This will help you not only understand something closer to an agreed-upon-truth, but it will also help you develop critical thinking skills.

If you'd like to read a book that does a much better job of explaining this than I do, Find a copy of Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. It's a little old and there's been quite a bit of ink spilled praising and reviling the book, but I think Novick does a good job of probing the question.

>While he may have brought NSH to a wider audience

This is why my point was about influence more than anything else.
As to your point about objectivity, this is central question that has been challenged by post structuralist writers. (I reject your premise that this is a product of the counterculture.) Zinn is extremely upfront that he is assuming a position in his work. He spends several pages establishing what is perspective is and why.

While most historians since Zinn have settled on a sort of "reasonable analysis" rather than "purposeful commentary," ideas about objectivity in historical writing are notoriously contentious. "Objectivity" should not be thrown around as though there is objective history as opposed to opinion history. See Novick's That Noble Dream

The answer, as everyone else has pointed out, is YES. The best example of this actually comes from the colloquialism 'Whiggish history' meaning history that is written in a teleological mode with an excessively celebratory tone about the current institutions in power.

If you are really interested in this, standard reading in many history masters and PHD programs is a great book by historian Peter Novice called That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession