Lives and Times, Then and Now

Biography and history have been twinned in relating the past at least since Homer peopled his epic of the Trojan War with characters more memorable than the causes for which they fought and Plutarch employed sketches of great Greeks and Romans to explain what made Greece Greece and Rome Rome. The balance between biographies and histories—between lives and times—has shifted with changing philosophies and tastes. Romantics of the early nineteenth century swooned over heroes, with Thomas Carlyle articulating the case for hero-worship and declaring: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”¹ Karl Marx disagreed. Observing the rise of industrial capitalism in England and elsewhere, Marx stressed classes rather than individuals and asserted, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” He added, with the flair that would give his thinking longer life than it deserved: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”²

Academics have often discounted biography, partly because the genre has been thought to lack methodological sophistication and partly because biographies of the nameless and faceless women and men favored by the last few generations of scholars are often difficult to write. But the reading public has never abandoned biography. Many intelligent, interested persons find biographies fascinating even though they may have shunned history since they were compelled to memorize dates and events in high school. Biographies are about people, just as novels and movies are about people. People have perennial appeal.

Yet biographies have limited reach. The life of one person tells us only so much about the world that man or woman inhabited. Theoretically it would be possible to write a million or a billion biographies—depending on how much of the world is under investigation—and add them up. But that might miss the interactions among the individuals. An entire intellectual industry has developed during the last generation around the idea that complex systems transcend linearity: they are more than the sum of their parts. History is a system as complex as they come; surely the principle applies here.

All the same, historians return to biography again and again. Academic historians warn their graduate students against writing biographies for dissertations, but once tenured, many academics discover that biographies are useful for attracting precisely those audiences of nonspecialists whose eyes glaze over on hearing the word “history.” Such audiences include students, especially undergraduates in required history courses. They also include readers who might buy enough copies to help with the college bills of the authors’ children.

Sheila L. Skemp disclaims writing a traditional biography, but she wouldn’t deny that The Making of a Patriot is biographical in approach. She employs Benjamin Franklin as her vehicle for explaining how the inhabitants of Britain’s North American colonies forged a new identity in the 1770s and 1780s, entering the period as Britons and emerging as Americans. She centers her story on Franklin’s appearance before the British Privy Council at the Cockpit, a meeting room in Whitehall, in January 1774. Franklin had been representing the interests of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other American colonies for several years; he had tried to change the minds of government ministers and members of Parliament who were determined to cut the British government’s budget deficit by raising taxes on the Americans. His testimony had contributed to Parliament’s decision to repeal the Stamp Act, which had provoked rioting in America, but it did little to shake the principle, widely held in Britain but broadly rejected in America, that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies. Consequently, Franklin found...