Nowhere do historians go in for so much self-examination as they do in America: it is a part of American culture to examine the self. The same conglomeration of habits also accounts for American historians' exceptional willingness to listen to self-appointed guides, some of them sane but more of them not evidently so. The profession therefore lends itself well to the sort of analysis that Peter Novick has undertaken in this fascinating, if rather over-long, book. (Excessive length in books is another American habit.)

However, this passion for commitment, this accumulation of fretful worries and serious night thoughts, has made a splendid story. Novick has chosen the recurrent desire of American historians to provide an objective account of the past, in the face of contemptuous complaints that such a thing is impossible, to structure his description of a century of learned endeavours. That is the noble dream of his title, a dream which again and again, just when it looked likely to turn into a waking experience of reality, turned into a nightmare. He opens the story in the late nineteenth century when a first generation of American historians aspiring to professional status learned their trade in Germany, returning full of Ranke and the cult of the objective study of the past. Their preoccupation with the search for a pure truth then suffered two setbacks.