Editing Historiography (section)

====Biography====
{{Further|Biography}}
Biography has been a major form of historiography since the days when [[Plutarch]] wrote the parallel lives of great Roman and Greek leaders. It is a field especially attractive to nonacademic historians, and often to the spouses or children of famous people, who have access to the trove of letters and documents. Academic historians tend to downplay biography because it pays too little attention to broad social, cultural, political and economic forces, and perhaps too much attention to popular psychology. The "[[Great man theory|Great Man]]" tradition in Britain originated in the multi-volume ''[[Dictionary of National Biography]]'' (which originated in 1882 and issued updates into the 1970s); it continues to this day in the new ''[[Dictionary of National Biography|Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]]''. In the United States, the ''[[Dictionary of American Biography]]'' was planned in the late 1920s and appeared with numerous supplements into the 1980s. It has now been displaced by the ''[[American National Biography]]'' as well as numerous smaller historical encyclopedias that give thorough coverage to Great Persons. Bookstores do a thriving business in biographies, which sell far more copies than the esoteric monographs based on post-structuralism, cultural, racial or gender history. [[Michael Holroyd]] says the last forty years "may be seen as a golden age of biography", but nevertheless calls it the "shallow end of history". Nicolas Barker argues that "more and more biographies command an ever larger readership", as he speculates that biography has come "to express the spirit of our age".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Riall |first1=Lucy |year=2010 |title=The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political Biography |journal=Journal of Interdisciplinary History |volume=40 |issue=3 |pages=375–397 |doi=10.1162/jinh.2010.40.3.375 |s2cid=144340286 }}</ref>

Daniel R. Meister argues that:
{{blockquote|Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory.<ref>Daniel R. Meister, "The biographical turn and the case for historical biography" ''History Compass'' (Dec. 2017) {{doi|10.1111/hic3.12436}} [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12436/abstract?campaign=wolearlyview abstract] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171213204736/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12436/abstract?campaign=wolearlyview |date=2017-12-13 }}</ref>}}