Historians on the autobiographical frontier

American Historical Review

Volumn 104, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 725-748

  Popkin, Jeremy D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0142196015     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2650986     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. Pierre Nora, introduction to Nora, ed., Essais d'ego-histoire (Paris, 1987), 5-7. The contributors were Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, and René Rémond.
2. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 45.
3. G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (New York, 1967), 67.
4. Rémond, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 294.
5. Annie Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre (Paris, 1991).
6. Joel Williamson, "Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian," Journal of American History 83 (1997): 1221-53, followed by the comments of seven reviewers.
7. Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, Helen R. Lane, trans. (New York, 1980), 144.
8. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986), 7.
9. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston, 1996).
10. Cecil Eby, Book World, October 19, 1969,
11. cited in Book Review Digest (1969): 650.
12. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, Katherine Leary, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1989), 235.
13. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duty, eds., A History of Private Life, 5 vols., Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987-92).
14. Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, Daniel Roche, ed., Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York, 1986).
15. Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978).
16. Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (New York, 1990), 82.
17. Martin Duberman, Cures (New York, 1991), 37, 67, 122.
18. Albert E. Stone, "Modern American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions," in American Autobiography: Texts and Transactions, Paul John Eakin, ed. (Madison, Wis., 1991), 108.
19. Other important contributions to recent theorizing about the genre are Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-facement," Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919-30;
20. Lejeune, On Autobiography;
21. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J., 1972);
22. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, 1985);
23. Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, 1992);
24. and Susanna Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984).
25. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 310.
26. Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, "Introduction," in A Crack in the Minor: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Jay Ruby, ed. (Philadelphia, 1982), 5-6.
27. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
28. For England, see the previously cited work of Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, and the long series of volumes of personal reminiscences published by Richard Cobb;
29. from Israel, Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian, Ann Brenner and Zipora Brody, trans. (Hanover, N.H., 1995);
30. from Italy, Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, Lisa Erdberg, trans. (Hanover, 1996).
31. Paris, 1984-92. About a third of this massive work has now been translated into English under the title of Realms of Memory, Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. (New York, 1996-98).
32. Philippe Ariès, Un historien du dimanche (Paris, 1980);
33. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier P.C.-P.S.U. 1945-1963 (Paris, 1982).
34. Pierre Nora, introduction to Essais d'ego-histoire, 5.
35. Pierre Nora, "Entre mémoire et histoire," in Les lieux de mémoire: 1. La république, xxxiii.
36. Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 5.
37. Raoul Girardet, Singulièrement libre (Paris, 1990);
38. other subsequent memoirs by Nora's contributors include Georges Duby, History Continues, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Chicago, 1994);
39. and Jacques Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire (Paris, 1996).
40. Alain Besançon, Une génération (Paris, 1987).
41. For a more detailed overview and listing of these French publications, see Jeremy D. Popkin, "Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers," French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 1139-67.
42. Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (Philadelphia, 1982), 2.
43. John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York, 1982);
44. William L. Langer, Up from the Ranks (n.p., 1975);
45. H. Stuart Hughes, Gentleman Rebel: The Memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes (New York, 1990);
46. C. Vann Woodward, Looking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, La., 1986);
47. Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley, Calif., 1987);
48. and Michael Kammen, "Michael Kammen," in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Shelly Andrews, ed., vol. 23 (1996), 133-63.
49. One could also include in this category shorter texts such as the contributions of Carl Schorske (1987), John Hope Franklin (1988), and Natalie Zemon Davis (1997) to the ACLS "A Life of Learning" series.
50. Conway, Road from Coorain;
51. Jill Ker Conway, True North (New York, 1994);
52. Hans Schmitt, Lucky Victim (Baton Rouge, La., 1989);
53. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996);
54. Peter Kenez, Varieties of Fear: Growing Up Jewish under Nazism and Communism (Washington, D.C., 1995);
55. Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1998).
56. Henry Abelove, et al., eds., Visions of History (New York, 1984);
57. Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston, 1994);
58. James W. Silver, Running Scared: Silver in Mississippi (Jackson, Miss., 1984).
59. For African-American historians, in addition to John Hope Franklin's essay (see n. 30), see C. Eric Lincoln, Coming through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America (Durham, N.C., 1996);
60. Vincent Harding, in Abelove, Visions of History;
61. Darlene Clark Hine and David Levering Lewis, in the collective volume Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History, Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1996).
62. Several American Jewish historians are represented in People of the Book: Thirty Jewish Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. (Madison, Wis., 1996).
63. Gabriel Jackson, Historian's Quest (New York, 1969);
64. Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (New York, 1989).
65. Louis R. Harlan, All at Sea: Coming of Age in World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1996);
66. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time.
67. This is, of course, not necessarily the case. Few autobiographers are either reckless enough or privileged enough to publish their texts without submitting them to some kind of editorial process. Gabriel Jackson has been kind enough to share with me the text of several chapters omitted from the English-language version of his memoir, Historian's Quest, at the insistence of his editor, but later included in the Spanish edition of his book. The American editor wanted Jackson's book to focus on a historian's personal encounter with the reality of the foreign culture he was studying; as a result, the book omitted, among other things, a chapter describing the impact of McCarthyism on Jackson's career.
68. Fairbank, Chinabound, 450, 451-54.
69. Duberman, Cures, 80.
70. A bibliography circulated at a memorial session in Cobb's honor in 1997 listed eight volumes of autobiographical material written after his well-known essay, "A Second Identity," was published in 1969.
71. Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks (New York, 1998).
72. Gay, My German Question, 207, x.
73. Lincoln, Coming through the Fire, 7.
74. Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 7.
75. Schmitt, Lucky Victim, 242;
76. W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London, 1954), 41.
77. Charles Petrie, A Historian Looks at His World (London, 1972), 3.
78. Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 20;
79. Kenez, Varieties of Fear, 36.
80. Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires; Rousseau to Perec (Oxford, 1993), 327.
81. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 5.
82. Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 124.
83. John Burt Foster, "Cultural Multiplicity in Two Modern Autobiographies: Friedländer's When Memory Comes and Dinesen's Out of Africa," Southern Humanities Review 29 (1995): 210.
84. Choice, March 1991,
85. cited in Book Review Digest (1991): 207.
86. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels, ed. (1918; rpt. edn., Boston, 1973), 300.
87. On Labrousse, see Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 304-05, 616-18;
88. Michelle Perrot, "L'air du temps," in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 276-77;
89. Pierre Goubert, Un parcours d'historien (Paris, 1996), 135-42;
90. on Braudel, Goubert, 159-66; Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire, 49-50, 161-63, 180n;
91. Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 223, 227.
92. Examples are Raul Hilberg's complaints about the reception of his work and about rivals in the field (Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 127, 142-46),
93. even though some of his remarks about the discipline's disdain for Holocaust scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a kernel of truth, and H. Stuart Hughes's denunciation of his second wife's rejection for tenure at Harvard (Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 296-98).
94. Katz, With My Own Eyes, 164.
95. May, Coming to Terms, 308.
96. Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 706.
97. George Mosse, "Ich bleibe Emigrant": Gespräche mit George L. Masse, Irene Runge and Uwe Stelbrink, eds. (Berlin, 1991), 62. Mosse was working on an English-language autobiography before his death in January 1999.
98. Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 284-85.
99. Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 60, 96.
100. Eakin, Touching the World, 145.
101. Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London, 1993), 186.
102. Freeman is referring specifically to Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain.
103. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, Georges A. Bonnard, ed. (New York, 1966), 107, 117.
104. Adams, Education, 162.
105. Le Goff, Une vie pour l'histoire, 7;
106. Girardet, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 139.
107. May, Coming to Terms, 12.
108. See also Charles P. Roland, "A Citizen-Soldier Remembers World War II," in Military Leadership and Command: The John Biggs Cincinnati Lectures, 1987 (Lexington, Va., 1987), 101-18. Roland's talk, originally given as a faculty seminar in my own department at the University of Kentucky, was one of the first stimuli to my interest in this subject.
109. Rémond, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 297.
110. Chaunu, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 74.
111. Alfred Grosser, Une vie de français (Paris, 1997), 32.
112. Harlan, All at Sea, 122.
113. Carl E. Schorske, A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, April 23, 1987 (Washington, D.C., 1987), 8.
114. Hughes, Gentleman Rebel, 146, 179, 184.
115. Fairbank, Chinabound, 312.
116. Besançon, Une génération, 325.
117. Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 36-37.
118. Agulhon, in Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire, 24.
119. Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 195.
120. Besançon, Une génération, 315.
121. Le Roy Ladurie, Paris-Montpellier, 164.
122. Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, 616-17, 621, 676-77.
123. Girardet, Singulièrement libre, 34, 43. Alexsey Stakhanov was a Soviet "model worker" in the 1930s, celebrated for overfulfilling his work assignments.
124. Besançon, Une génération, 325.
125. John Hope Franklin, A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture (New York, 1988), 8.
126. Philippe Lejeune, "The Autobiographical Pact (bis)," in Lejeune, On Autobiography, 131-32.
127. Olney, Metaphors of Self, 36.
128. Olney, Metaphors of Self, 36-37.