| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Lloyd E. Ambrosius, editor. Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 166. $45.00.
Historians have long argued whether biography is properly a form of history and, if so, if it is a superior form of historical writing. The editor of this volume, Lloyd E. Ambrosius, and its contributors answer both questions positively. In preparing these essays the six historians—three women and three men—were asked "to reflect on their experiences as biographers" and to offer "their insights into the writing of biography as a form of historical analysis" (p. vii).	1
Shirley A. Leckie, the noted biographer of Elizabeth ("Libby") Bacon Custer and historian Angie Debo, contributes one of the strongest essays in this collection. Leckie draws illuminatingly from other biographers to show how their experiences influenced her work. Countering Stanley Fish's ridiculous dismissal of biography as "Minutiae without Meaning," Leckie argues persuasively that "biography matters more than it mattered in the past" (p. 20) because in an expanded, global world we must have additional life stories to reconnect with diverse national and international experiences. Leckie utilizes her work in western American history to assert that we need biographies of people on the far side, the non-European and female side, of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier.	. . .

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