Don't Know Much about (the History of) History

Abstract

Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988) was the first book I read as a graduate student. It served as my introduction to the guild I was about to join, and a marvelous introduction it proved to be. The book surveyed over 100 years of American historical practice, evaluating the careers of all of the major figures in the profession and many of the minor ones as well. It managed quite deftly to balance a consideration of a weighty methodological issue-the question of how historians pursued the elusive goal of objectivity-with a sizeable amount of juicy insider gossip. What I did not understand as I sat in my first-year seminar, and what I have only come to appreciate subsequently, was that Novick's book filled a large void. There simply was not, and there still is not, much writing about the nature, philosophy, or even history of American history. That Novick, while an American, is himself a scholar of European history only seemed to underscore this historiographic lacuna. (It also caused a certain annoyance among some number of American historians.) By and large, American historians have been an unreflective lot, a prosaic group who go about their business without giving too much thought to the epistemological challenges inherent in doing that business. Americans have been writing history, in the modem sense, as long as the Europeans have, but we have not produced many philosophers of history. It would be hard to come up with a list of American historians to rank alongside of Leopold von Ranke, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georges Trevelyan, Marc Bloch, and Michel Foucault, to name several, as intellectuals who thought deeply about the nature of history and of historical practice. Indeed, as Novick pointed out, by the mid-1980s, when he was at work on his book, the American Historical Review had largely eliminated historiological questions from its pages; the annual gatherings of the American Historical Association did not find room for any sessions on epistemological questions; and the editorial board of History and Theory,