Conventional History: First Person and the Historians Who Use It

One way to earn the strike of a historian’s red pen is to use the first person. The singular letter “I” (not to mention its kindred criminal “we”) has indeed drawn the ire of those in the history profession. “Place yourself in the background,” historians may intone, quoting the timeless advice of Strunk and White. Yet in calling their students to heed this guidance, they may be positioning them in conflict with another piece of time-tested advice: emulating the best of their field. Of a survey of the finalists and winners of the top two prizes in the history field--the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for history--well over half mobilized the first person singular. The titans of the field, it seems, regularly break one of the “generally agreed” upon conventions of their kind.

This poster presentation draws attention to the ways historians have mobilized the first person throughout the 20th and 21st century. It presents a statistical analysis of the field’s prize-winning monographs, charting when first person usage surged and retreated throughout the early 20th century to the current day. This research shows that continuity--rather than change--categorizes historians’ usage of the first person and that continuity means dominance. Since 2000, for example, the majority of works winning the field’s top prizes--or earning finalist status--have used the first person. (For the purposes of this analysis, acknowledgements were excluded.) Thirty out of the 44 books (68%) winning the Bancroft used the first person singular while 31 out of 53 books (58.5%) earning finalist status for the Pulitzer did.

While this poster will display quantitative data from 1917 onward, it will also display qualitative musings. Historians’ usage of the first person singular falls into distinctive categories. While some historians have used “I” as a scaffolding device (i.e. “I have divided this task into three sections…”), others have used it as a way to express a moment of identity intersection (i.e. “When I first learned about…”). Further analysis looks for patterns in content of monographs using “I.” Ultimately, this project contends that historians have used “I” as a way to address the challenges of bridging two of the major historiographic shifts of the last two hundred years, namely the quest for a scientific history and (what would come to be labeled) the postmodern sensibility.