The aspiration to relate the past ?as it really happened? has been the central goal of American professional historians since the late nineteenth century. In this remarkable history of the profession, Peter Novick shows how the idea and ideal of objectivity were elaborated, challenged, modified, and[...]

How and when did the Holocaust come to loom so large in postwar Jewish and American and international life? This is the question that this book sets out to answer. It asks whether defining Jewishness in terms of victimhood alone does not hand Hitler a posthumous victory.[...]