This masterly collection of texts interrogates the raging academic question, What is art history? Editor Preziosi, who directs ground-breaking critical studies of art history and museology, provides introductions to 35 challenging readings gathered in nine chapters. This plethora of alternatives is curiously complicated, even obfuscating. Covered here are the most current and relevant approaches to aesthetics, style, iconography and semiology, feminism, gender studies, formalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, museography, hybridity, and multiculturalism; those offering critical analysis range from Winckelmann, Kant, Wolfflin, Panofsky, Schapiro, Gombrich, and Derrida to Rosalind Krauss and Carol Duncan. Ultimately, this book is best suited to upper- and graduate-level collections and to the reference shelf of specialized art collections, as it proposes the discipline of art history itself as an art.AMary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD

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 defended over the last century. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence as well as the published writings of hundreds of American historians from J. Franklin Jameson and Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Eugene Genovese, That Noble Dream is a richly textured account of what American historians have thought they were doing, or ought to be doing, when they wrote history - how their principles influenced their practice and practical exigencies influenced their principles.