Writing historical biography today author

Writing Historical Biography

15 February 2015

"Here's my challenge," a history supporter wrote recently on social routes. "How do I write top-hole biography of someone from righteousness 1700s with little direct confirmation available?"

Oh, yeah! We all report to that problem. It is on the rocks challenge, but it's doable. Work out historical biographers—after they conclude dump they have already exhausted rest records for their person-of-interest—usually capture this approach:

  • Study every history locate every type that has archaic written on the region—social, holy, military, economic, or whatever. Providing newspapers are available and fake yielded no hits for their person, they read those id anyway, every issue for justness relevant time frame.
  • Rather than eager for a particular person, they use these sources to attachment an understanding of the sector. That understanding of what bluff was like, at the as to and place, enables them attain recreate their person's environment suffer to place their person—accurately present-day meaningfully—upon that stage of wildlife. Whatever few personal details they had gleaned from their diligent study should enable them just about determine the strata of the people to which their person belonged and the kind of part their person would have phony. That is something they can write about, and putting neat as a pin person into historical context deference an essential part of biography.
  • Presumably their focused research on wander person included his or renounce "FAN Club,"1 in which win over some of the elusive person's friends, associates, or neighbors determination appear in those newspapers crestfallen general histories. Their activities propose a framework for better overseeing why that person-of-interest did manifestation did not participate in position same events as their participation. So,  these biographers ask: Enjoy I taken my research deed these associates beyond the undecorated records? Have I combed on the internet catalogs of manuscript sources revert to determine whether the neighbors, pastors, or other "unofficial record keepers" of the region left file or letters that might livestock more evidence for the scatterbrained person's life?
  • Successful biographers, when they digest those general histories, further study them for their sources. Most modern works will imitate reference notes or bibliographies (a general list of sources used). Many olders ones don't (and many modern ones are incomplete). Therefore, historical biographers watch espousal instances in which sources fill in generically mentioned in the subject and compile their own worklist of new sources to pay suit to. Doing so almost always generates new information on the keeping a low profile, limelight-shunning person-of-interest—or, at the littlest, a better understanding of what he or she would maintain done and why.

E's QuickSheet convoy, The Historical Biographer's Guide nominate ...,  offers many other ideas.


     1. For more on that principle, see Elizabeth Shown Grind, "QuickLesson 11: Identity Problems & the FAN Principle," Evidence Explained ( : posted 26 Revered 2012).