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1 The eleven essays in this book are offered to readers with two principal frameworks in mind. The essays provide examples of how some historians come by their creativity as scholars in a field that readily captures the personal stories of millions of ordinary people, intimately caught up in the processes of history. Through the stories these historians tell about how they found their subject matter and the struggle to gain legitimacy for it in the eyes of their discipline, the essays also serve to demonstrate the ways in which the academic mainstream came to be widened to include new voices, ideas, and subjects. The editors have divided the labor of contextualizing these essays. I discuss these two themes in this general introduction, with an emphasis on processes of general societal assimilation and the diversification of academic disciplines. Alan Kraut’s coda offers his autobiographical remarks as a narrative of his entrance into the field of history and as a point of departure for reviewing the ways in which the individual authors have imaginatively organized their experiences within the understandings of immigration and ethnic history. The stories offered in this collection provide a window into understanding the enormous changes in the nature of thinking about what is and who is American that have arisen in the last five decades in the United States. During those decades, the nation evolved from a society in which the formal standard of belonging was more or less an insistent homogeneity to a society in which cultural diversity and identificational diversity have become valorized. Through their writings and careers, historians such as our essayists have played a significant but not widely understood role in the evolution of this new standard of American belonging. This has not only been true in regard to race and ethnicity but also most evidently displayed in the majority of our essays, to gender. The widening of the 1 Introduction DAVID A. GERBER 2 DAVID A. GERBER academic mainstream reflected in this collection is as much about the gender revolution in the composition of faculties and the subject matter of the disciplines as it is about where people come from in national and cultural terms. Indeed, the most visible transformation of academia in the last half century has been the profound movement of faculties and of research to encompass women across a wide swath of disciplines and discourses. A number of our senior contributors , who began to forge academic careers in the late s and early s, were foot soldiers in this revolution, fighting frequently lonely battles for inclusion of both themselves and women’s historical experience of the sort documented in Barbara Posadas’s essay. Before delving more deeply into our two frameworks for contextualizing the essays, it is necessary to make a point about the criteria for inclusion in this collection . The editors did not seek authors primarily because they fit neatly into molds that might document these frameworks. Above all else, we sought those whom we knew, partly from personal acquaintance, but more often from their published work, to be gifted storytellers. We wanted individuals who were both imaginative and analytical, and who might well have a talent for writing a memoir that evoked a crucial part of their autobiographies. It is not that the published work of any of these historians up to this moment has necessarily ever made an explicitly autobiographical statement explaining how and why they became historians, or any other facet of their own lives for that matter. Instead, in conversations with each other the editors came to conclusions about which historians gave evidence just below the surface of their published work of seeming to be moved by an unusual degree of empathy or inspired by identity with their historical subjects. These judgments were ultimately intuitive. They were informed by frequent reading of the authors’ works, sometimes in the context of assigning a work for teaching over the course of many semesters. Yet, however manifest to a sensitive reader, those qualities did not necessarily seem immediately pertinent to our authors’ own sense of the foundations of their creativity as scholars. History is the most empirical of the humanities disciplines. It has strong positivist and empiricist traditions, which date from the Enlightenment but have been deepened by the influence of behavioral science in the twentieth century: these traditions insist on emotional distancing of its practitioners from their subject matter and from the human subjects they study. It is true that the boundaries of the personal...

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