Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier

Memory, History, and Ego-Histoire: Narrating and Re-enacting the Australian Freedom Ride

“…In his study of historians' autobiographies, Jeremy Popkin shows that despite the possible pitfalls-having their work regarded as uninteresting, trivial, or naive-historians have been turning to autobiography in large numbers. 22 Popkin draws particular attention to ego-histoire, so named by Pierre Nora in his collection of essays by French historians that appeared in 1987. For this collection, Essais d'ego-histoire, Nora invited a group of French historians who had lived through the mid-twentieth century, especially World War II, to narrate their own personal experiences of public events.…”

Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968

“…Alun Munslow (2003) lists them together among the 'biographer-historians who deploy history as a representational cultural activity' and who use history 'as an increasingly self-reflexive form of biography, perhaps even as a hybrid of the autobiographical and the historical' (p. 2). Jeremy Popkin (1999) notes how they each 'challenge the notion of the isolated, autonomous self' and 'fracture chronology, jumping forward and backward through their subjects' lives and thus rejecting the standard autobiographical portrayal of a coherent personality developing over time ' (p. 736). This established way of looking at Steedman and Passerini fits them within the post-modernist paradigm of 'rethinking history', and sees their autobiographical approach primarily as a 'critique of the traditional […] historian's role' (Popkin, 2005: 75).…”

Political memoirs and intimate confessions: Analysing four US gay liberation/gay rights militants’ memoirs

“…And that is precisely what makes these sources all the more interesting to the sociological eye: it offers an opportunity to examine the militant identities that the authors deploy in their narrative reconstruction of the movement and of their participation in it. Gay militants' memoirs -especially those of Martin Duberman -have been analysed before, in ways that sometimes emphasize the personal at the expense of the social (Cohler, 2007;Hammack and Cohler, 2011;Robinson, 1999), or the reverse (D'Emilio, 1992;Popkin, 1999Popkin, , 2005. This article will instead endeavour to fully appreciate the interaction of the personal and the social in order to gauge the degree to which confessions about sexuality take on a meaning that escapes authors' control, or whether that meaning is a reflection of the authors' agency.…”