Biographies in the Classroom

Whenever opening up discussion of a biography I have assigned to a class, I can't help thinking of—and sharing with my students—Jill Lepore's thoughtfully eloquent comments on the quandaries of writing biography. Lepore recounts her experience encountering a lock of Noah Webster's hair preserved among his papers at Amherst. After trading in her "yellow call slip for that swirl of ginger hair," she felt herself "feeling closer to Webster than I had ever felt when reading even his most personal papers . . . holding it in the palm of my hand made me feel an eerie intimacy with Noah himself . . . against all logic, it made me feel as though I knew him—and, even less logically, liked him—just a bit better." ¹ Lepore's delightful and candid anecdote helps students—some of whom imagine that the importance of every historical work is self-evident—begin to think about why and how history gets written. It provides them with a useful lesson in critical thinking regarding the relationship of an historian to his or her work, bringing additional nuance to questions of objectivity.

While biography remains one of the most commercially successful genres of historical literature, at the same time it is often treated with a certain (and not unreasonable) wariness by scholars, given how frequently it is the case that popular—and even scholarly biographies—can suffer from lack of context and one-dimensionality. Too often, also, the authors of biographies are their subject's greatest promoters or, equally problematically, detractors. Perhaps the turn toward social history in the 1960s was a healthy reaction to the overemphasis in past generations on "great" individuals at the expense of the more faceless masses, but as is so often the case, the pendulum (its edges worn by overuse as metaphor) can swing too far in the other direction. As a graduate student, even though among my teachers were distinguished writers of biography, I intuited that the form was, for many, a suspect form of historical writing. No matter one's own feelings on biographies, it is these issues themselves that can make them some of the most effective teaching tools.

In every history course I teach, I typically include at least one biographical or autobiographical work on the required reading list. Recently, in my religious history courses, I have used classic memoirs such as Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative (1682) and Dorothy Day's From Union Square to Rome, to academic works like Patrick Carey's Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane and Thomas Reeves' America's Bishop: the Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen.

Undergraduate student reactions to autobiographies range from admiration for the subject, to cynicism regarding the intentions of writers of autobiographies. I regularly ask students why they think I chose to assign a particular work. At least some swill answer that they assume the reason is that I like the person who is the subject of the biography. Their more astute classmates will offer thoughtful comments about the problem of evaluating the relevance of the individual in broader historical movements. In any event, I find that the emphasis on individual agency implied in the biographical genre helps students enter into a particular time or place with a sense of immediacy that other forms of writing do not usually afford. This is particularly true when it comes to evaluating questions of injustice in the past, and avoiding the perennial problem of seeing such questions through the fog of present-day perspective. Biography can help students imagine how they might have reacted to a situation had they been in the shoes of its subject.