When Peter Novick passed away recently, I immediately thought of the enormous impact that That Noble Dream had on my generation of graduate students.  The book was published in September, 1988, the very month that I began graduate school. The book’s importance to many of my fellow graduate students and myself rested on at least three factors: first, it immediately became a centerpiece of the reading list for the historiography / methods course that we all took in our first semester of grad school (i.e. it was going to be “on the test”); second, it provided a historical narrative of Read more