Abstract
Psychohistory has long struggled to find ways of bridging individual and group experience. It has been a field painfully focused on biography, which is interesting but, in the minds of most historians, ultimately trivial. The individual case may or may not illuminate the whole. The idiosyncracy of personal experience can never be factored out. The leading journal in the discipline of history, the American Historical Review, for example, refuses to publish biographical articles except in unusual circumstances, and then only when the connection between the individual figure’s life and larger historical events is made explicit.
Keywords
Collect Work Slave Trade Republican Party Compulsive Sexual Activity Conspiracy Theory
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Notes
- 1.John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Woman in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (1975); 1-29Google Scholar
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