Difference between biography and historiannie
Program: Biography and history
Peter Mares: In the introduction to his biography of American president Thomas Jefferson, historian Arthur Schlesinger said that one of the main purposes of biography was to remind us that 'the great public figures also put on their pants one leg at a time'.
The best biographies often provide insight into the intimate lives of important historical figures, which might help explain why biography is so popular with readers.
Some historians are uncomfortable with biography because of the way it personalises the past.
Others increasingly incorporate individual life stories into their work in an effort to make history richer and to convey not just events, but also emotions and experiences.
So how should we understand the relationship between biography and history and the role of the personal in the past?
Difference between biography and historiannie love What is the ideal gas law constant? What is the lewis structure for hcn? Historians, on the other hand, focus on objectivity and analysis, using a wide range of sources to reconstruct the past and interpret its significance. So it also gives a much more complex view of what is actually happening and what these big terms like 'class' or 'empire' actually mean when you look at them from different perspectives.Professor Barbara Caine is head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney, and the author of several books, including most recently Biography and History. Barbara Caine, welcome to The Book Show.
Barbara Caine: Thank you, hello.
Peter Mares: What is the difference between biography and history?
Barbara Caine: That's a very big question.
I suppose in a general way people would think about history as telling one about societies, nations, international orders, institutions, wereas biography deals much more with individual lives. It's a distinction that was drawn a very, very long time ago by Plutarch and he argued that he did biography because he dealt with the personal and the intimate, in a way, those aspects of people's lives and not just their public actions.
So I suppose that is one of the other things about biography, that history has often dealt with major individuals but biography tends to be more interested in the inner person or the relationship between the private person and the public world.
Peter Mares: Can we see biography as a subset of history, or do they sit separately from one another?
Barbara Caine: No, I would see biography as a subset of history, I think that is very much what it is.
The problem though is that biography is also a subset of literature. So in terms of how people actually think about and theorise biography, they come at it from different positions, and most of the writing about biography has been done by literary people who keep thinking that it's not theorised in the way the novel is but really it ought to be seen as a part of literature.
So that's part of the issue as well, that more writing is done about biography by literary people than by historians.
Peter Mares: And I think it is true, isn't it, that the rise of biography as a form in the English language occurred around the 17th century, around the same time as the rise of the novel.
Barbara Caine: Yes, I think that's very much the case.
Biography is probably a little bit later. The start of modern biography is often taken to be the 18th century and Samuel Johnson, Johnson's own Lives of the Poet, and then Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, they're the key rich texts for the establishment of modern biography.
Difference between biography and historiannie finance: That gave biography something of a bad name in history, didn't it. A lot of micro-history involves small-scale studies of local communities or a day in a particular year. Barbara Caine : Yes, micro-history involved other sorts of things as well. And one has to rely to a certain extent on the capacity of the historian or the historical biographer to have read enough to be giving a considered judgement about that.
But it is very much around the novel, and in some ways the conventions are much the same. And lots of novels take the form of a biography and autobiography. I mean, think about Dickens' David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, right the way through the history of the novel, the life of an individual has been the subject of a novel.
Peter Mares: Why do we see those forms arise at that moment in history?
Barbara Caine: There's a lot of discussion about the rise of the novel, sometimes connecting it with questions about social and economic change, the rise of the middle class with a new kind of taste.
The thing about the novel is, as the term suggests, novel as 'new', the novel was a form of literature in which new and interesting and individual stories were the ones that were taken to be interesting, and that differed from drama or poetry which reworked classical themes at its highest form. So the novel is often connected with the rise of individualism, with the rise of urban society, with the rise of new ways of thinking about the individual and society.
Peter Mares: And so I guess it's then not at all surprising that biography sort of parallels that, that the two go together.
Barbara Caine: No, absolutely, and that biography deals with things like writers and poets and groups that are becoming more prominent.
Peter Mares: We have seen history being criticised in the past for being too focused on individuals, particularly individual leaders, you know, the 'deeds of great men' version of history, what Caesar did, what Churchill did, what Hitler did, how extraordinary these people were as individuals.
That gave biography something of a bad name in history, didn't it.
Barbara Caine: Very much so, yes. For much of the 20th century when history was defining itself as a discipline, biography had very little place in it, and people kept commenting on how it overstated the role of the individual and that what one wanted to know about was social structures or social institutions or political structures.
So yes, biography was seen as very much a fringe thing, as much simpler, as lacking the complexity of history, and also as lacking the kind of rigour that proper historical analysis required.
Peter Mares: And we got the kind of feminist and Marxist critiques as well, that it was leaving out a lot of the broader population.
Barbara Caine: The great man or occasionally the great woman, yes.
Peter Mares: So what we're now seeing or what you've identified is a resurgent interest in individual stories as part of history writing.
Difference between biography and historiannie I would say that both are similar and co-related and of literary genre. She gave a recent lecture on these issues at the university, but she is also the author of a book examining these questions in greater detail. In contrast, historical writing situates events within their broader historical context, exploring the social, political, and cultural forces that influenced them. Table of Contents 1 What are the differences between history and biography?You call it a biographical turn. What do you mean by that?
Barbara Caine: I didn't coin that phrase. It is used quite widely by people who talk about the biographical turn in the humanities and social sciences, and what they mean is the shift in the way in which, from the s onwards, individual case studies came to be seen as more and more important as ways of illustrating broad-scale social or cultural change.
So it is a move away from thinking in terms of larger structures towards looking at the many different ways in which individuals understand and experience and think about the world and represent themselves within it. So in history I suppose it seems to me what's interesting is that takes a variety of different forms, but one of them has been much more interested in the lives of obscure people who had no significant historical role but whose lives help illustrate how working-class people or middle-class women or peasants in the 15th and 16th century, how they understood and felt about the world.
Peter Mares: The famous example of this that you quote in your writing is a book called The Cheese and the Worms by an Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.
Tell us a bit about that as an example to illustrate what you mean.
Barbara Caine: Ginzburg's book, which was published in Italian in and then translated four years later, was a sort of path-breaking book because he used records of an inquisition. This guy, the miller, was called before the inquisition and accused of heresy and indeed found guilty of it, but what he was doing was reading through those inquisition records in order to get a very, very detailed sense of how a miller who would otherwise have not been known at all, how he understood and thought about the world and his very, very curious theological and religious views.
So it was that way in which people began to try and work out the ways in which one could understand actual individual lives. Rather than seeing peasants in the period before the modern world as just in statistical terms, one could actually get a sense of how they thought about and understood the world, how they saw their relationships, how they understood their religion, how they live their daily lives.
Peter Mares: And is this what is meant by micro-history?
Barbara Caine: Yes, micro-history involved other sorts of things as well.
A lot of micro-history involves small-scale studies of local communities or a day in a particular year. Micro-history is a way of using a very small scale episode or event or situation in order to try and see within it how the broader historical currents affect everyday life for ordinary people.
Peter Mares: And I guess the aim is to give us a richer, a finer grained kind ofor perhaps in another metaphor, a grittier view of history.
Barbara Caine: It very much is intended to do that, and it is also intended to try and, as it were, get under history.
All the things about micro-history and biography have also come at a time when people are talking about the decline of grand narratives. So whereas once upon a time one thought about things like the rise of the middle-class or whatever, the emergence of international societies, something bigger in that kind of way
Peter Mares: The process of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution, yes.
Barbara Caine: Exactly, then people would start saying, hang on a minute, in order to get that story you're only looking at certain records, you're looking at the records of dominant institutions, dominant organisations, powerful men.
But if you dig underneath that, where were women in relationship to that, where are the colonised, where are indigenous people in the process of empire?
Then people started to want to go in and get a much clearer sense of how individuals who were subject of these big broad changes understood them, how they resisted them, how they thought about them. So it also gives a much more complex view of what is actually happening and what these big terms like 'class' or 'empire' actually mean when you look at them from different perspectives.
Peter Mares: There is a tension here though too, isn't there, between the particular and the general.
You know, to take an individual life or an individual moment as illustrative of a particular epoch or era, or a particular account, a witness account of something as definitive. There is a risk I suppose in skewing our idea of history.
Barbara Caine: Yes, there is a risk. I think historians in general have become much more conscious of the fact that getting a clear and coherent and comprehensive picture of the past is extremely difficult, and interpretation is always an issue within it.
And one has to rely to a certain extent on the capacity of the historian or the historical biographer to have read enough to be giving a considered judgement about that. So if one takes the work I was first interested in, say, which is about middle-class women in the mid 19th century, it was an attempt to try and look at what we knew in terms of demography and statistics and so on, and then take that with you when you went and looked at a very detailed case, in my case a family of nine Victorian women, and then to look at how each of them experienced growing up, coming out in a social sense, marriage, motherhood, bearing of children, domestic life, but always trying to read that individual within a framework that was established by the broader pattern.
But at the same time there is always a risk, yes.
Peter Mares: I guess there is a risk because narrative is so attractive. The stories are so good often, do they run the risk of taking over the history?
Barbara Caine: In some cases they do but I think one tends to be bound by the sorts of issues that you're dealing with, and you have to just select your stories, in a way, in accordance with the kind of situation you're dealing with or the argument that you're making.
I think that that would be a thing for most historians, that if what you're doingif, as a number of historians are doing, if what you're wanting to do is to use individual lives to illustrate broader patterns, then what you do want to do is say where they do it and sometimes where they don't, where they might be completely extraordinary or exceptional or bizarre, but also the very nature of that bizarre is culturally bound, if you see what I mean.
Peter Mares: What makes it interesting is that it is the exception or it shows the way in which someone is against the currents of their today.
Barbara Caine: Yes, that's right, breaks out of the rules.
But they can only do it in a particular way at a particular time because of how the rules then are set.
Peter Mares: There is another element here. We've talked about getting the grit of history, if you like, what did slaves in the colonial United States eat for dinner, those sorts of things, but there is also another level below that which is the more subjective experience, that is trying to get a handle on how people experience things, on emotions.
Barbara Caine: Yes, and that's a really hard one.
For some time historians were very keen on this notion about how people experience things, and we still want to know that, but it's quite hard to get that because all the things that people write about how they feel are always being written for a reason and for someone else.
Difference between biography and historiannie marie But if you dig underneath that, where were women in relationship to that, where are the colonised, where are indigenous people in the process of empire? In the introduction to his biography of American president Thomas Jefferson, historian Arthur Schlesinger said that one of the main purposes of biography was to remind us that 'the great public figures of our time But they can only do it in a particular way at a particular time because of how the rules then are set. The thing about the novel is, as the term suggests, novel as 'new', the novel was a form of literature in which new and interesting and individual stories were the ones that were taken to be interesting, and that differed from drama or poetry which reworked classical themes at its highest form.So they require quite careful reading. People don't give you their experience on a plate, you have to read it in their letters, in their diaries, in their memoirs, and what you're often getting is how they represent those experiences, how they describe themselves, how they create themselves for other people.
So I do think we're sort of sometimes very aware of the fact that you can't quite get at that, that there isn't an essential person there that you can just get out. You can get as close as you possiblyyou can get close to it sometimes. But I suppose it's a little bit like thinking about the people that we know, that you might know a friend in one way and another friend will know that same friend in a different way, and people are complex and multilayered.
Peter Mares: Indeed, and if I'm writing a letter to my mother it might be a rather different letter to the one I'm writing to my wife or to a friend in Germany, there will be different parts of myself I'm revealing in those different circumstances.
Barbara Caine: Exactly.
And I think one of the ways in which history has changed is I think once upon a timeI think up until about the s and '80s what the historian would have done would be to say, well, if I read all these letters I can get the essential person underneath. But I think quite a lot of people would now say isn't it interesting to see the range and the discrepancies and the different sorts of ways in which Peter writes these letters, and we've got to take account of all the contradictions and the paradoxes that are there.
Peter Mares: It's a bit like Peer Gynt's onion, you take a layer of the onion looking for the inner core and you keep taking all the layers off and then there is nothing left.
We are our layers, indeed.
Barbara Caine: That's exactly right, yes.
Peter Mares: We began by talking about the 'great men' approach to history, and of course that hasn't gone away entirely, but there has been a very marked shift in the approach taken to major historical figures, and you give the example of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler.
Why was that so different to other biographies of Hitler?
Barbara Caine: I suppose the thing isjust as you were saying at the beginning, the 'great man' biographies of the past used to assume that these are great figures, and especially someone who seems to have as much power as Hitler and determined to lives and fates of so many people, that they were exceptional and there was some incredible qualities that made them exceptional, and that the biography would in some way try and work that out, what those qualities were and how, and show you how that person stood out from the mass of ordinary people.
Peter Mares: What made them unique.
Barbara Caine: What made them absolutely unique.
I think now the difference (and Kershaw is a very interesting example of this) would be that people would want to argue that you can't understand the person without understanding the society around them.
The point that Kershaw makes about Hitler is that actually Hitler doesn't have any particularly notable characteristics, he wouldn't have been a great person anywhere else. Kershaw calls him an un-person, with no marked qualities, and so the thing that interests Kershaw is the question about how did conditions within German society allow this person to rise in this way and exercise this kind of power?
What was the relationship between them? So the point here is to see the relationship between an individual who exercises power and the circumstances and a situation that enable him to do it.
Peter Mares: And the question he raises; how did someone with so few intellectual gifts as Hitler, so few social attributes, how did he come to have such a huge historical impact?
Barbara Caine: Yes.
And the details that he wants to give relate to the nature of German society, what had been happening in Weimar Germany, the kind of distress and disquiet and so on, and the way in which all of that contributed to making people hear Hitler in particular kinds of ways and to recognise and accord him the powers of leadership in that way.
Peter Mares: Another example of this approach to biography that you mention in your own writing is Janet Browne's biography of Charles Darwin which focused not on his brilliance but asked instead; 'How did the most unspectacular person of all time produce one of the most radical books of the 19th century?'
Barbara Caine: Yes, that's right, so that is again very interesting because it is taking a similar kind of approach in terms of the history of science.
And again, what Browne is arguing is that we don't have this unique genius, what we have is a person of extraordinary privilege and we have to understand the significance of that privilege in terms of wealth and education and all things being provided for him, but also the way in which Darwin was supported by a group of very close friends and it was the friends who went out and got him his material, who enabled him to stay in Down House, who brought him things, who read his manuscripts, who were sent out to actually publicise his views, who defended him.
And she has that lovely view of him with a spider's web and him controlling all the threads, as all these devoted people came and assisted and supported him. And she insists that The Origin of Species was in effect a social act, it's a product of all these different things; his own social background, but also his intellectual networks.
Peter Mares: So if it hadn't been Darwin it would have been someone else, the times would have in some way given rise to the theory of evolution.
Barbara Caine: Well, in the Darwin case there is Alfred Wallace, isn't there, the way in which Darwin opened this letter one day and there was somebody else arguing in a very different way something not dissimilar from him and the terrible crisis that produced for him.
So yes, you can see it as a kind of step in an argument that had been under way for a while, and then him doing it in a very particular way, writing The Origin of Species in a way that took.
Peter Mares: How does the industry of publishing bring to bear on this, because we all know biography is a more popular form with readers than general histories are, so are historians actually under pressure to be more popular or to write books that will sell better and therefore be more biographical?
Barbara Caine: That certainly is a factor, and that's been there for a very long time.
Difference between biography and historiannie brass And I think one of the ways in which history has changed is I think once upon a time Share with students that they are beginning the biography genre today. Then people started to want to go in and get a much clearer sense of how individuals who were subject of these big broad changes understood them, how they resisted them, how they thought about them. And it's not only the publishing pressure, I think there's also a way in which historians have the capacity to connect with a much wider audience if they write biographies.Right through the 20th century a number of historians have written biographies. One wonderful example is Isaac Deutscher, who was a Marxist historian who wanted to write a history of the Soviet Union in the '20s and '30s, and Oxford University Press said no, write us a biography of Stalin, which he did. And Ian Kershaw makes that point about himself too, that he was asked by a publisher to write the biography of Hitler.
The thing I think I would want to argue is that prior to the s and '80s, historians wrote biographies or the biography as kind of separate from their historical work, whereas what happened in the last two or three decades is they begin to see it as part of their work and they see how it relates to the other things they're doing, and argue about the connection of that life to the wider social and political picture that they're wanting to develop.
But certainly I think publishers are there. And it's not only the publishing pressure, I think there's also a way in which historians have the capacity to connect with a much wider audience if they write biographies.
Peter Mares: Indeed. Barbara Caine, thank you very much for joining us on The Book Show.
Barbara Caine: Thank you.
Peter Mares: Barbara Caine is a Professor of History and the head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney.
She gave a recent lecture on these issues at the university, but she is also the author of a book examining these questions in greater detail. The book is called Biography and History and it is published by Palgrave Macmillan.