Round Table: Self and Subject

Last summer the Journal of American History invited several historians to write short essays on the nexus of self and subject, on the stories we tell about our own lives and the stories we write about history. In other disciplines—anthropology, for example—authors increasingly include personal vignettes in their scholarly books and articles. Historians have for the most part avoided such explicit self-reflection. But the questions remain: Do the ways we imagine and narrate our own pasts shape the histories we write, or are our own lives and our constructions of them mostly irrelevant? Is self-revelation a useful way to acknowledge our standpoints, interests, and assumptions, or more often a route to self-indulgence? Should we reflect on ourselves—on or off the printed page—as we write a less personal past? In the round table that follows, our essayists grapple with these and other questions.	1
Here Is the Problem: An Introduction Richard White
Here is the problem. I am currently reading Pedro de Castañeda's "Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado." Castañeda took part in the expedition, but his narrative is not a memoir. It is a history in which the author is present, but he is not present enough for me. I read the "Narrative" because, like any historian, I write my histories in part from other histories. I need to know why, and on what evidence, Castañeda told some of the stories that he did. Why did he remember what he remembered? How did he know what he claimed to know? What led him, in particular, to remember, create, and write the story, if a sentence or two can be called a story, of "the painted Indian woman": her capture, her escape, and her reappearance, if she reappeared, several hundred miles to the east?1 I need, in short, to know more about Castañeda than he provides in his own history. Castañeda is not forthcoming. He has created a greater distance between self and subject than I desire. As earlier histories transmute into sources, we want, we need, to know about their production. They were not immaculately conceived. We do not, however, necessarily want people to know such things about our histories. In our own histories we resist revealing ourselves and often for very good reasons.	2
There is another side to this coin, and here, too, is the problem. Our uneasiness at knowing too much about the authorial self is contained in the punch line of a joke that we have all heard. We tell it and laugh because it seems to refer to the excesses of another discipline and not our own. It is a joke about the anthropologists attempting to confront the crisis in their discipline that Karen Halttunen refers to in her essay. The anthropologist has been listening to her informant with growing impatience. Finally, she interrupts. "But enough about you," the anthropologist says, "let's talk about me." Or, to use a crueler example, a friend of mine once told me to look up "Gitlin, Todd" in the index of Todd Gitlin's book, The Sixties. The first entry is "at Bronx High School of Science," the last is "writings by." The entries for Todd Gitlin alone roughly equal those for Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Betty Friedan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Abbie Hoffman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy combined.2	3
We should be careful about how much we enter our own narratives for the most basic of all reasons. As Michael O'Brien puts it, in overtly confessional histories there is a danger that we forget that "the center of the historical enterprise is not the historian, but those whom she or he narrates."3	. . .