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Review
| History, Historians, & Autobiography, by Jeremy D. Popkin. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 329 pages. $35.00, cloth.
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| Jeremy D. Popkin states that the purpose of this unique book is to explore the relations between history and autobiography, two ways of "narrating and preserving the past" (p. 4 that are not often analyzed together. In two theoretical chapters, Popkin compares autobiography to two of its literary cousins, history and fiction. (Surprisingly, he does not compare autobiography to biography.) In discussing autobiography from the viewpoint of narrative theory, he rejects both Hayden White's putting history (and implicitly autobiography) on the same plane as fiction and David Carr's linkage of history and autobiography because the narratives of both are built into the structure of reality. Instead, he embraces Paul Ricoeur's view that autobiography includes characteristics of both history and fiction. Most of Popkin's book is devoted to the analyses of three hundred mostly recent autobiographies written by historians. Their motives in writing these personal accounts included preserving memories of now vanished ways of life, examining their position as members of a marginal group such as women, a minority, or immigrants, and recounting their participation in significant world events such as the world wars or the Holocaust. Many historians affiliated with the "microhistory" movement of recording the lives of obscure individuals wrote autobiographies in order to present insights into aspects of modern society. |
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Most of the historians' autobiographies Popkin studies are from the United States, France, Britain, and Australia, and he notes some national differences. In a separate category, Popkin discusses the two "classic" historians' autobiographies, those of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams. Though both have similarities in being "intellectual autobiographies concerned above all with the development of their authors' mind" (pp. 94–95), Gibbon's was the story of a success, while Adams's that of what he considered to be a failure. Gibbon ("the historian as hero") made himself the protagonist of a great drama the plot of which was the writing of his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Adams paralleled his personal "failure" with the decline of American culture during his lifetime from "the Enlightenment moralism of the family tradition" to "the more forward-looking and commercial nineteenth-century spirit" (p. 114). For Popkin's more recent and numerous historian autobiographers, the choice of their vocation was a common theme. For many, like Friedrich Meinecke, their "interest in history owed a great deal to the experience of being born into a world that was on the verge of disappearing" (p. 125)—pre-industrial rural or small town life. Other historians made a difficult choice of the study of history over other disciplines. Many women in particular chose careers as academic historians only after a long delay in other pursuits. |
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Popkin seems to agree with those historians who viewed writing about their "repetitive and unstorylike" (p. 155) work as historians as a challenge. He frequently asserts (pp. 163, 170) that teaching and writing history is inherently boring and almost impossible to make interesting to a general reader. Rare drama in the lives of these historians came from disputes with colleagues over historical interpretations or academic politics—conflicts that often did not reflect well on the writers. The campus protests of the 1960s also injected some excitement into historians' professional lives, but most—even the leftist ones—reacted to them negatively because they interfered with their universities' educational purpose. Not surprisingly, almost all of the historians Popkin considers wrote about the historical events through which they lived. Most of them played only minor roles in the great military and political tumults of the twentieth century, but a few, like presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and ambassador Edwin Reischauer, themselves influenced history. During World War II, historians often were assigned work behind the lines in intelligence services such as the OSS; many of them were frustrated by their lack of impact on decision- making or even of a sense they were contributing to the war effort at all. Whereas many European historians active in political movements were communists who came to regret that involvement, most American historians were in the civil rights or anti-Vietnam War movements and later viewed their participation positively. No matter how major or minor their roles, most of the historians thought their involvement in the important events of their lifetimes contributed significantly to their understanding of history. |
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Popkin studies the memoirs of a number of Jewish historians who lived through the Holocaust. None of them were confined in a concentration camp—all either escaped from Nazi-occupied territory before they could be imprisoned or survived by hiding. Rather than viewing their experiences in the non-historical terms of death camp survivors like Elie Wiesel, the historians put these events into the context of their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust. Perhaps surprisingly, many of them did not find their identity as Jews reinforced by their Holocaust experiences, and continued to pursue assimilation to the non-Jewish cultures in which they lived. A few historian-autobiographers experimented with literary form—including fictional elements, non-chronological structure, third-person narration, and multiple biography. Popkin lauds such "hybrid forms of narrative" that combined history with autobiography and expanded "the possibilities of autobiography" (pp. 253, 276). Popkin concludes that all of the historians' autobiographies made contributions to both history and autobiography—exposing the subjective element in history and adding the important element of historical context to autobiography. Throughout this book, Popkin adroitly reveals and insightfully analyzes the many significant aspects of historians' autobiographies. Some readers may feel frustration with the postmodernistic theoretical perspective from which he considers the works. But he does a great service in introducing us to this diverse and fascinating body of material. |
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| Fort Hays State University |
David S. Bovee |
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