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Crafting Historians' Lives: Autobiographical Constructions and Disciplinary Discourses after the Linguistic Turn*

One of the stories about the practice of history that we tell ourselves nowadays is that in the past historians scrupulously effaced themselves from their work while in recent times the self-discipline of the trade has relaxed. Naturally, this tale admits of different readings. William H. McNeill construes the rise of selfrevelation among historians as progress, an enlightened recognition of the close interplay between the observer of the past and the past under observation superceding the benighted notion of fifty or sixty years ago “that the personality and the biographical element in anybody’s contribution” to the science of history are “irrelevant.” David Blackbourn sees in the same propensity to self-expression a descent into self-indulgence, with the bedrock question of historical inquiry “shifting from ‘what happened?’ to ‘how was it for you?’” Just how forcefully the injunction to self-restraint operated among historians in the past is far from certain. Edward Gibbon composed several memoirs of his life, though well before Ranke had set the writing of history to rights; and more than two decades after the foundation of the American Historical Association Henry