NICHOLAS D. CHABRAJA CENTER FOR HISTORICAL STUDIES

The Stories in Our Histories: Historians Confront Themselves

Conference convener: Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History

 May 9-10, 2024

In the last two decades, a number of historians have begun to use their skills to investigate their own family histories and their own lives. The focus by a new group of historians on the personal brings together the democratizing trends of social history with a focus on what particular individuals and families can bring to our understanding of major historical events.

These personal, often intimate, histories align with historians’ ongoing attention to individuals and families as one way to understand and explore broad questions of historical change, but they are also innovative on several accounts. By focusing on an individual across his or her lifetime, or a family across generations, the broader historical arc is inhabited by people who humanize the history.  Additionally, historians can preserve materials from their families and communities that might not otherwise be saved, through a combination of professional skill and personal connection. Finally, by making themselves or their families the subject of their histories, historians might gain greater sensitivity to the ways in which we attend to our usual historical subjects and sources. When historians and their families become the sources, or even the archives, for their research projects, there is an opportunity for them to experience what it’s like to be the object of research.

The Stories in Our Histories brings together several groups of writers and historians. The Keynote Conversation invites historically minded creative writers to share their ideas about how historical works and historians helped them understand their projects—and what historians might learn from them about research and writing. Many if not most of the writers engaged in these kinds of histories are also seeking to explore modes of writing that reach beyond academics to a larger audience: the craft of writing is as important as the research. 

 The following day, a number of distinguished historians engaged in a variety of personal histories—genealogy, memoir, family history, biography, and traditional history—discuss what centering their personal stories reveals about historical methods; questions of objectivity and professionalism; and desires to reach a larger audience. Together, conference participants and audience members will discuss the methodological challenges, interpretive interventions and creative opportunities these works present. The conference will close with two distinguished historians who have studied this new trend intensively, and who can share their experiences of our time together, and suggestions for future directions.